Talk about entitled. Freemium exists because of piracy. Why blame the video game industry for something caused by criminals. Developers need to eat too.
Citation needed, a lot of the games sell pretty well without using freemium, things like Doom Eternal, Resident Evil 8, et al, plus a lot of games have fremium over already asking for full price, things like Call Of Duty Cold War.
my personal take : freemium exists because the video game industry figured out to exploit the gambling bugs in the human psyche to leverage them to gain even further profit.
If piracy killed gaming so badly, how are the market numbers represented from now (when piracy is rampant and distribution is easy) from then (let's say the 80s or early 90s when distribution was near impossible and DRM wasn't needed as physical copying was prohibitive enough?)
Gee, a quick search shows me that the video game industry is bigger than it ever has been, and the growth hasn't ever plateau'd. In fact, if the industry was in danger from piracy destroying all revenue it'd be easy to show me the dip where freemium tactics began to help the recovery -- can you point that dip out to me?
I haven't been able to find that dip.
Hypothesis : the adoption of freemium tactics had nothing to do with loss-of-sales revenue and everything to do with increasing profits.
Let me correct you: Freemium exists because a bunch of nihilistic dipshits decided that it was OK to charge users not to endure a completely fabricated delay just because they knew they would pay to progress in the game. Also that people realized that things nonessential to game progression such as emotes and outfits were valuable to users in multiplayer games.
Piracy has existed as long as games have and continues to this day, and yet FOR SOME REASON, gaming (not the casino kind) is the most profitable entertainment industry in the world at this time.
Want to know the truth? Only poor people pirate (just like any criminal, you usually have to be poor to be motivated to be a bad actor), so the vast majority are not actually lost sales. As soon as game lovers get some cash, they throw down to get the games they want.
I tend to not wholly agree. While I have spent insane amounts of money on both computer games and movies, some of us pirate simply to get rid of obnoxious DRM crap. As an example, I find it infuriating that my multimedia setup involves two separate but identical DVD players, just to get around DVD region crap.
I regularly play minecraft together with my daughter on our LAN,
but recently I've had to configure two extra dummy accounts just to be able to continue playing with her, to get around Microsoft now requiring all mojang accounts be 'migrated' to microsoft accounts. Including their dark pattern, where your initial account is locked and flagged for 'suspicious activity' (), so they can try to squeeze your mobile phone number out of you, if you want to play the game you BOUGHT, after 7 days have passed.
() There IS no 'suspicious activity', their activity log indicated 5 logins FROM MY HOME ADDRESS, which by the way reveals that they are continously tracking the lat/lon coordinates of me playing the minecraft game I PAID FOR.
And not only poor people pirate, or commit any crime in general.
It works in reverse. Activities by poor people, that rich people don't appreciate, is what our society labels 'crime'. When rich people commit unwanted activities, it is called 'privilege'. There is a reason poor people are incarcerated in prisons, whereas rich people are fined for their transgressions. I have yet to hear of more than a single person (a swiss guy) going to jail for what transpired in 2007 and 2008. If anybody got in prison for that in 2008, it was the victims.
I too hate what modern games have become.
And I hate that I used to be able to buy movies as perpetual DVDs, but that big business privilege in the intervening 20 years have changed the laws into "you have a right to RENT movies from us".
Not a big surprise that freemium games are a lot more profitable. A single whale provides more revenue than thousands of casual paying members and a smaller target audience is a lot easier to optimize for
I have basically the opposite opinion of this article. I often hold up Rocket League as an example of a great free-to-play game. 1) You 100% can unlock a lot of cosmetic items through free play. 2) The items that you buy have absolutely no impact on gameplay and are just visuals.
For the same reason that people wear nice clothes in real life, why are you surprised that some people want to look cool in a video game? Are you surprised that people don’t just wear monochrome black shirts in real life? Likewise, you can resell RL items, there’s a market for that. Are you surprised when you can’t resell a shirt you wore for a year at the same price as when you bought it?
That’s not to say that games where progression is locked behind time gates where you need to buy 1000 Realm Warp Crystals or whatever just to actually play the game aren’t a toxic hell. But that doesn’t seem to be what the article is pushing against.
Instead of crates, there are now blueprints. And instead of keys, there's credit to unlock the item of the blueprint. And instead of item drops, there are blueprints. There are still lootboxes, but these can be obtained only in events or challenges.
While I agree Rocket League is a good example of a free to play with cosmetics, I think it got worse with the blueprint system. Now you're limited to one item per week (from the blue lootbox). And if you get the blueprint of item you want, you can't pay only for that item, you need to buy a package of credits, that may be more than you actually need.
One complaint I've had with RL recently is that it seems like they've put all their energy into new visuals and cosmetics while leaving the game mostly unchanged.
The standard multi ranked map sometimes feels boring and I've wondered why they don't add different types of maps to the mix; spheres, tubes, different physics, goals in the center, figure 8 map(?), embankments (like map in season 1), etc.
I guess it's simple and works but it'd be cool to see new gameplay related updates.
They did this a long time in the past (See: Rocket League Rocket Labs) and it was near-universally disliked.
The complication when it comes to adding new features is that Rocket League is built on top of a bespoke scripting engine that was discontinued after Unreal Engine 3, so they have to fully recreate RL in UE5. Because of this they don't want to put any additional resources into new features for UE3 since it's wasted effort once the game transitions to the new engine.
Fair criticism, but one that is only relevant in the first place because of freemium. Prior to that business model, there was no such thing as a company continuing to provide regular, ongoing support to a 7 year old game of the non-subscription variety.
I mean, how or why would they? You release something; it makes 90% of its lifetime revenue in year 1; if you continue working on it for 6 more years, you're out of business.
As for the ownership or survivability of in-game virtual goods -- I think the author is referring to Valve's hats in Team Fortress 2? -- to me it's nonsensical to complain that you don't own it outside of the game. It only has relevance in the game, and it would be silly to ask the company to develop some external service just for owning your object. The ones that have tried that kind of thing just fail and look silly. But wait! Along come NFTs, with potential permanent ownership... but gamers despise that idea, too.
Gamers are just eternally grumpy and conservative about changes and progress. (I say that as a grumpy gamer, myself.)
Wounded pride and a ton of money for a small company like that. They got enough money to comfortably run the company for at least a couple years if not the entire time since launch until now. The wikipedia page sticks it right along-side other highly successful AAA launches around the same time because it was that "successful" despite being an absolute mess of a game: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Man%27s_Sky#Sales
Yep, nothing to see here, no regular, ongoing support to a 20 year old game of the non-subscription variety at all. Warcraft 3 (from 2003) was similarly updated well into 2019.
Now, most regular games only get 2 or 3 years of attention.
> Along come NFTs, with potential permanent ownership... but gamers despise that idea, too.
Oh no, how dare we despise things that anyone can see will not work as advertised.
Adding to that list, most valve games (even half life 1 from 1996) still getting updates today, and indie game terraria released in 2011 which got big content updates over a decade.
If we are going to mention Terraria, we should also talk about Minecraft. I purchased it in 2009 and I'm still getting new content on a regular basis today. It's true that they have a subscription offering through Realms at this point, but it's entirely optional.
Starcraft is the exception rather than the rule. If you take a random sample of 20 year old games I'd wager that in the vast majority of samples none of them will have received updates in the last 15 years.
That's only regular if you ignore the 8 years of no updates between patch 1.16.1 in January 2009 to 1.18 in 2017. The same year they released Remastered to sell people. They've since also added cosmetics in skins and voice announcers: https://us.shop.battle.net/en-us/family/starcraft-remastered
Similarly Warcraft 3 had a 5 year gap between 1.26b in 2011 and 1.27a in 2016, which was probably about when they started development for Reforged, announced in 2018.
Even ignoring the patches after the gaps, that's still 1998 to 2009 and 2003 to 2011, so both much larger time spans than the parent poster's claim that nobody ever does that.
> there was no such thing as a company continuing to provide regular, ongoing support to a 7 year old game of the non-subscription variety.
Minecraft still gets significant updates.
> I mean, how or why would they? You release something; it makes 90% of its lifetime revenue in year 1; if you continue working on it for 6 more years, you're out of business.
I think a lot of these companies have found that it's the opposite—that games make 90% of their revenue in year 1 because nobody continues working on them. If you keep working on it, however, you can continue to get sales, because the more you work on it, the better the game becomes, and so people buy it just to see what everyone else is talking about.
Minecraft also has a marketplace, and a "Realms" subscription, and you can purchase it on different platforms if you want to play like that so there's plenty of ways to keep revenue coming
> Along come NFTs, with potential permanent ownership... but gamers despise that idea, too.
Permanent ownership of what? If the game servers shut down or you get banned[1] for some reason your permanent ownership is meaningless. Also how are NFTs different than the existing systems like the Steam marketplace in terms of functionality?
[1] Oh yeah, NFTs require you to have an online account for the game. I would argue my unlocks in SSBM are much more permanent than any game NFT because there's no account for Nintendo to ban that could cause me to lose access to them.
Thanks for the clarification. I haven't followed the NFT hype much but the one game startup founder I know who talks about it had ideas for permanent ownership in some kind of ... hand-waves metaverse.
Personally I view games as art that's closer to food than a painting: ephemeral, may disappear after being consumed.
> Fair criticism, but one that is only relevant in the first place because of freemium. Prior to that business model, there was no such thing as a company continuing to provide regular, ongoing support to a 7 year old game of the non-subscription variety.
Plenty of games get regular patches and updates (Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition being one I recently played) and back in the day, games would release paid expansions. No reason that Rocket League couldn't sell a map pack, for example. Sure, its a similar idea as freemium (pay for more content), but at least the expansions used to be sizable packs with lots of content. Old school expansions, as well as expansions like those of The Witcher 3 or the FROM Software games (which are often lauded as better than the base game), that cost about 1/4 the price of the base game for a decent content boost extend the life of the game, provide the developer with continued income and feel a lot less scammy than fremium games do.
I don't trust AAA studios, or any game studio for that matter, to implement NFTs in a responsible and ethical manner.
Ubisoft has announced NFT integration via their own platform. However, unlike an actual "I can do what I want with this" token, it may as well be a database entry in the company network: https://quartz.ubisoft.com/welcome/
I don't think there's any way to 'solve' NFTs in games right now: A true NFT can be moved anywhere on an open network (monkey jpeg receipts, etc), but a game-related NFT needs to be constrained to those users who play the game, otherwise it's even more useless.
It doesn't help that most things NFT-related are scams, hype bait, etc.
> I don't think there's any way to 'solve' NFTs in games right now: A true NFT can be moved anywhere on an open network (monkey jpeg receipts, etc), but a game-related NFT needs to be constrained to those users who play the game, otherwise it's even more useless.
Agree totally. NFTs for games make quite literally no sense. You are buying an asset or whatever from a central authority (the developer/publisher) that only exists or makes any sense within their game/platform/ecosystem. What value could a token bring there? The only value add I could see is that your ability to buy and sell the asset is now out of the hands of the publisher... except it isn't since they still control access to the asset and can therefor constrain your use of it in any way they see fit.
This is really a problem with most of the NFT related ideas floating around. Once a central authority is involved your token ceases being meaningful and just becomes, like you said, an ID in a database somewhere.
They can create digital scarcity of in-game items using a centralised server. Any NFT linked to an in-game item will be just as worthless when the servers are eventually shut down. And they don't want players buying and selling items, they want to take a cut every time a player buys something.
You're never going to be taking your Fortnite skins into FIFA or your Gran Turismo cars into Mario Kart. Ain't going to happen for a multitude of reasons.
(And if one publisher/developer does something like that as a gimmick, allow importing items into a specific another game, they could do that with a centralised database too)
Not that I'm outright opposed to this kind of thing, but often messing with core mechanics in wacky ways is a lot more fun on paper than in practice.
There's a lot of games that have a sort of boring standard (SC2's 1v1 ladder maps are all same-y, nobody competitive plays Smash with items on, etc.) and the fact that you see this pop up repeatedly in unrelated communities should probably tell you something.
IMO, when you have a game with sufficiently deep mechanics, wackiness tends to obscure that depth, resulting in an experience that's less interesting rather than more. Like if you added Mario Kart abilities to football/soccer and suddenly the winning team was getting regularly blue shelled, I don't think it would improve the experience, even if initially it'd be hilarious.
Now maybe it's still worth it to have "party game" modes in some cases, I'm just saying that these modes might not have legs, so to speak, and thus may not be worth the dev effort if hardly anyone plays them.
Those are pretty bad examples. Mario Kart and Smash are literally some of the top selling games of all time. If their "wacky ways" are played and enjoyed by 10% of players, that's still millions of sales.
They were designed to be party games first and foremost though. I think it's different when you take a more serious game and try to layer wackiness on top. If nothing else, there's a huge difference in player expectations.
Anyway that's why I also used SC2 as an example. Blizzard's attempts to add more wackiness/variety to the 1v1 ladder maps have generally been poorly received.
Now, SC2's co-op mode has a bunch of wackiness and did great, but note that this is very VERY separate from standard ladder/melee games. It's not just "oh we changed a few rules" or "we took the base game and added wacky items" it's a much more fundamental rework than that, it's an entirely new 'vertical' for the game. And yeah, that kind of thing could probably work for a game like Rocket League.
It's probably more like 99% of players, but I think you're missing the point a little. What that commenter is getting at is that if your target audience are competitive players then it's not in your best interest to introduce "wackier" modes, as it isn't what those sorts of players want and might actually be off putting to them.
If your primary audience is casual, like in the case of Nintendo games, then it makes all the sense in the world.
Obviously you could argue that Psyonix ought to be appealing to a casual audience. That's a separate conversation, and I'd argue that RL is a fundamentally bad fit for that sort of game, but given what they have been going for thus far, not introducing crazier modes makes a lot of sense.
That's like saying they should change the rules of football. Rocket League is a seriously competitive game and even the slightest change to the physics would have a big impact. I like that they have kept the core gameplay intact. It's beautiful and pure.
The reason is because people absolutely hated that Tokyo map with the embankments, myself included. Rocket League is unique in that the core gameplay is so good, that messing around with it is just a bad idea. It’s like asking why there aren’t new pieces being released for Chess, or why people don’t start adding unconventional elements to a soccer field. It’s because novelties like those take away from what is already a solid experience. They have added some modes to that in non-competitive Rocket League, but RL is a unique game in that it seems like most players play the game in competitive modes, where those novelties are not appreciated, and so putting lots of work into those kinds of alternative arenas just doesn’t make a lot of sense.
I personally am glad the developers have realized they have a game like this and haven’t killed their game through adding more for the sake of more.
It wasn't great, but, it represented something different, and along with the hexagon map it added variety. Feels like there's much more room to get creative in terms of map shapes/obstacles/nuances.
> The standard multi ranked map sometimes feels boring and I've wondered why they don't add different types of maps to the mix; spheres, tubes, different physics, goals in the center, figure 8 map(?), embankments (like map in season 1), etc.
They tried. Wasteland, Neo Tokyo, and Starbase ARC were non-standard maps. Players complained about it, and now they are changed to be standard.
They added those types of arenas years ago and removed them all. In the ranked games these honestly felt to gimmicky and I'm pleased that the differences between arenas are now only cosmetic.
They still keep adding other game modes some of which are only there for a few days.
it's also super hard to build a great f2p and i think CSGO easily is the best. they bootstrapped it for almost 2 decades from a mod made by Minh Le to what it is today and I must say it is the only f2p game I regularly play.
simply because it actually pays to play. I've made about $20 bucks this month from just selling cases given out randomly at the end of each match. It cost me nothing to buy yet the in game items (cosmetic skins that don't influence gameplay) regularly sell for good money.
it also make sense to buy the keys to unlock the cases sometimes simply because you might unlock a skin that fetches far more money. so it is a bit like gambling in that aspect.
i'm just constantly amazed how they were able to pull the economics behind this. clearly the ppl who expect a 10~100x ROI on their keys must outnumber those selling the cases. I mean I can imagine a bunch of people just farming cases day and night. Perhaps even a sophisticated AI could pull it off since the in game drops aren't even correlated with your performance.
even more impressive is how this is all legal since it really is gambling of sorts.
I don't mind CSGO's flavor since it doesn't cost you money like poker but I can absolutely see somebody trying to buy multiple keys in hopes of unlocking a really good skin.
again this doesn't impact the gameplay at all and I'm happy to earn some money. was able to buy another title on steam with the money accrued
I don't know if you're just naive or not, but you're paying with literally the most valuable currency you have.
That doesn't mean it isn't fun to do so, although there's a very high chance you'll come to regret the number of hours pumped into such games and the way they kept you engaged in their dopamine loop.
I think this is more than anything, an app store sickness.
It has spread a little to consoles and desktop, but I can still buy a 100% offline, single player game, which has the main purpose of entertaining me.
It has a story, a point to it, a mystery often, fun things to do which aren't mining or grinding away.
I pay 80 bucks for the privilege, and am quite happy to do so. It is worth it, giving me many hours of entertainment.
Some boast "oh I finished the game first run through in 8 hours" Really? Such players just ignore all the scenery, don't really explore, don't grasp the full mystery, just... fast fast! Gotta get this over with!
I play and take in the scenery, and games like the Last of Us, Horizon Zero Dawn are fun, take 50 to 100 hours to play this way.
Just reading things in-games, clues, discovering how these worlds got this way was 1/2 the fun of the game!
So stop playing on your portable addiction device. Its hold is more devious too, as it is always in your pocket.
Your PC, console, are with you on the bus. At work. In the kitchen.
I have kids now and the last game I prioritized to play this way was BoW during a summer vacation. I just hope these grand single player offline adventures wont go extinct until I will get some solid free time again. But on the other hand, I have such a long backlog of "old games" I want to play so I'm not really worried. It's more my kids that will get caught up in the Fortnites of the future and never experience the world building possible.
As someone who once played a lot of counter strike, this comment is baffling. How about the part of the game where you try to shoot the people on the other team? Is that part fun or are you just in it for the casino mechanics?
I've been playing since 1.3, what part of it did you find baffling? you are not rewarded based on game performance, it is completely random to the point I don't even think about it and so I'm always focused on having fun.
it just so happens that I seem to get good cases that I was able to sell for a bit of change but it is not like you can play 20 hours every week and make consistent money.
you can still enjoy the game without taking part in it as it is optional and does not change your odds of winning, that is still skill based. if somebody wants to pay for a fancy skin I don't really see an issue.
people bet on soccer too but that shouldn't stop you from getting excitement from it.
> even more impressive is how this is all legal since it really is gambling of sorts.
In my home country (Belgium) and my neigboring country (Netherlands) a lot of games their lootboxes are not available for us for the reason that the game-creators do not advertise the dropchances like the lottery, casino's and other gambling games are forced to do.
The reasoning is that the items that come out of the lootbox have a monetary value (as you need to pay to unlock a lootbox) so they fall under some of our gambling laws.
In my eyes, good riddance and I hope more countries will follow.
So Valve, EA Games,... just disabled opening lootboxes for us as they seem to be afraid to advertise the "drop chances" (but we can still buy and sell them)
With CSGO third parties were essentially selling games for actual currency instead of credit with Valve and using skins as currency for gambling on esports matches. A few of them also came up with other gambling games that didn't even involve esports.
> Are you surprised when you can’t resell a shirt you wore for a year at the same price as when you bought it?
No, because the market for second-hand clothing is extremely oversaturated and clothing, particularly "fast fashion", simply does not last long enough to live a useful second life any more.
A video game skin however does not degrade, it will look the very same (or better) even in two decades.
"Are you surprised that people don’t just wear monochrome black shirts in real life?"
No and thats why its silly to say rocket league items have no impact on gameplay, ofcourse its nicer play with hot wheels car that has animated decals than grey corolla.
I would like game to be more like "if you get this good, you get these cool items" instead of something like "if we put paid rewards right next to free rewards, then 15% of our playerbase is going to buy paid tier." :/
I had no problem with dlc cars, it felt like I was supporting the game, now it feels like I'm being manipulated to give money to somebody who owns rocket league.
> now it feels like I'm being manipulated to give money to somebody who owns rocket league.
Epic Games. Why are we surprised by this when they saw a cash cow when they bought it, and have done nothing but turn it into another Fortnite?
I think this type of game needs its own genre. Fortnite, RL, GTA Online, Warzone... They all follow the same model of "build a good multiplayer experience and "support it" perpetually by squeezing as much revenue as you can from your users".
I was a huge RL fan in 2015/16. It started going down hill sometime after that and EG has run it into the ground.
> They all follow the same model of "build a good multiplayer experience and "support it" perpetually by squeezing as much revenue as you can from your users".
It's a viable business model and it allows players to enjoy the game for many years to come. What bothers me a little is that these revenue extracting schemes are usually very complicated and are probably complicated because it allows them to extract as much money as possible from a small subset of players. Like casino's and mobile games.
"Live Service" or "Games as a Service" may be the vocab you're looking for.
The game exists as a monetization engine. Some amount of fresh content is required to keep feeding the machine, but the goal is generally to let the machine run while dropping in bits of content and purchasable junk for the players to consume.
> I think this type of game needs its own genre. Fortnite, RL, GTA Online, Warzone... They all follow the same model of "build a good multiplayer experience and "support it" perpetually by squeezing as much revenue as you can from your users".
that's called "live service". In theory. A lot of games try to skip the "build a game that's actually fun and reasonably complete" part and just race to dump it on the market as soon as it's barely (or not even) playable and think they'll add content later. That's not live service, that's early access, and it's killed BFV and then BF2042 after it, Anthem, etc. EA is very very bad about this.
But yeah, when you hear a publisher say that a game is going to be a "live service", that's what it means, they want to do the fortnite model and squeeze ongoing revenue from the player base by whatever means. Sometimes it's cosmetic-only, sometimes it's not (R6: Siege), sometimes it starts one way and then becomes gameplay-affecting 6 months or 12 months down the road when they've got a player base who's attached to the game.
Of course, just like changing the game to add P2W elements after the fact, sometimes they won't. Valve basically abandoned TF2 about 5 years ago, they are still raking in money from it (it's still a top-10 game on steam...) but they won't even keep up with anti-cheat let alone continue development. Or even continue live service. No live service, only pay. And nor will they even allow the community to fix the game on their own, like Team Comtress 2...
I think a lot of people naively think of moves like this as pure money grabs and don’t appreciate that a lot of these moves are out of survival…especially for games like Rocket League that require a sufficient player base to even be a viable live service game.
Well, Rocket League doesn't need to be a "viable live service game", it could just be a regular multiplayer game that gives you a client and server executable to run your own.
It isn't like not being a live service game killed Quake 3, for example.
I don't believe RL or other modern online games could survive with even a tenth of the player base if they didn't have decent matchmaking, and you can't have decent matchmaking if you depend on players finding each other outside the game and one of them running a server and sharing the IP address. It's way too much friction to expect most players to do that.
Console games survive perfectly fine without any sort of anticheat/etc, maybe that would be bad for PC gaming but games could sustain their player base without anticheat, and matchmaking is neither necessary (lots of multiplayer games just don't use it at all) nor is it particularly expensive to run if that's all you're doing.
Obviously that would be a problem on the PC but games would remain popular and publishers would get paid without either of those things. Games as a whole wouldn't go anywhere. They just make more money this way.
Yes, obviously a big part of it is that every studio is hoping for their game to become the next WoW or Fortnite or Destiny— a franchise that will print money for a decade with not much more investment than a few content drops a year.
But I think the expectations of players have changed too, as far as matchmaking, leaderboards, progression, anti-cheat, anti-abuse, etc. You just can't deliver these things in a consistent way with the distributed client-server model, and companies needed to own the end-to-end experience vs farming out the community management side to faceless volunteer guild/clan/server operators.
I guess it depends what you mean by need. Many multiplayer games (like AoE2) have switched to a hosted server approach because it’s better for performance and matchmaking. I mean, thinking back 15 years, non-LAN multiplayer was not very good at all. Even LAN multiplayer could be hard to set up. Even today, it’s fairly limited (especially since your upload speed is probably severely limited). But hosted servers for everything have been fantastic. Multiplayer FPS games have extremely good performance. Network issues for games like AoE2 aren’t nearly as prevalent.
You can still run a default/master server, providing a server executable doesn't mean it is the only way to play the game. But if the game stops being popular in the future it doesn't kill the entire game.
The game will die financially at some point regardless, the message i replied to wrote that it is about the game surviving. A game does not need to absolutely require everyone use the same server to survive as has been proven by other games also not requiring that.
Keep in mind again that this is about the game surviving not about squeezing all the money possible out of their playerbase - after all the topic was about hating what video games have become.
I have 2600 hours in Rocket League. It's a fair bit for a "casual" player, but it's got nothing on pros (who are mostly up over 15k hours these days). I have some friends I play fairly regularly with, but we don't usually play against each other we play with each other.
The main reason I still play is to continue improving, and I don't think I could ever do that effectively if I was limited to only playing against people in my local sphere. My rank typically puts me somewhere in the top 1% of players (and honestly, I'm not even that good. The skill ceiling is insanely high), online match making may be frustrating sometimes but it's the easiest way to find opponents who will push those boundaries.
Would a hosted server work well for people who are much lower ranks who are primarily playing to just mess around with friends? Probably. I would quit tomorrow if online matchmaking went away though.
Arguably Rocket League does need to be a viable live service game. Without a sufficient player base, there's not enough for consistent match making...or you get matched to players far outside your skill level. Neither experience is good. Titanfall 2 is a good general example of attempting what you describe. As many have pointed out, that simply doesn't fly anymore. Quake 3 was over twenty years ago.
There are many different attempts at business models in games. Splitgate started with your suggestion and has since gone free to play. Numerous MMOs have tried subscriptions and have gone free to play. It's a sad state of affairs, but for every successful Minecraft, Stardew, or Valheim, there's thousands of failed attempts.
You can still run a master/default server (i'm repeating the same reply to everyone because it seems everyone has the assumption that providing a server executable means the game doesn't get to provide one or something).
I'm not sure I understand how providing a means to run your own server solves all these issues. Foremost in my mind is how you ensure competitive integrity when you can no longer trust all the servers. However, that's a bit beside the point.
The point I'm trying to make is that these things have been tried by one game or another, and there's good reasons why the "run your own server" model died for the most popular games. Ignoring that is, I think, discarding a lot of historical evidence and nuance against blanket "why don't they just do X" arguments.
If there's a better way, it won't be a return to the past. It will be something new that no one has thought of yet.
Rocket League reached something like 50 million players in its first year. They’ve likely earned over a billion dollars so far. This is not about survival, just squeezing your cash cows.
The whole 'preying on the vulnerable' thing kind of puts me off. But I want to respond to this:
> The items that you buy have absolutely no impact on gameplay and are just visuals
Cosmetic items are not just visual though. They are real elements in the game. Cosmetic items are interactive. They are unlockable, collectable, wearable items.
Further, visuals do impact the gameplay. You could argue about the difference between "gameplay" and "visuals" but each supports/influences the other and both are critical elements of almost every videogame. However you divide up the parts of a game, they all affect each other. Generally speaking, having all of the elements working together makes for a better game.
Monetisation strategies like microtransactions, loot boxes, etc. are also part of the game. However, the goal of such parts is not aligned with that of the others. The game is compromised by the introduction of the monetisation strategies.
> why are you surprised that some people want to look cool in a video game?
> Cosmetic items are not just visual though. They are real elements in the game.
Yes, I really hate this argument that cosmetics are not gameplay. Visuals are a huge part of what makes a game, no one would be happy if games shipped without textures and shaders and people would have to pay to unlock them.
Look “good”? Come on. If not having the Pickle Rick decal for your car makes you play worse it has nothing to do with looking “good”. Perhaps look “like I own this exclusive cosmetic”, which applies to offline as well, don’t you think?
The real problem is that loot boxes are gambling, and are addictive, period. It triggers something in otherwise rational people, especially children, that makes it feel good to spend money on mostly non-gameplay-altering cosmetics.
At some level it probably does. Even in Rocket League, which is more cosmetic than most, if your teammates are passing to you more than they would have with the default skin, then you'll do better.
As a medic in team fortress 2, I usually pocket and ubercharge the players with cosmetics. It's an important team resource, and the odds of someone with a "default" skin making good use of it are fairly low. Much like plumage for a bird it's a reliable signal of "virility" - if you're invested enough in the game to own a $200 hat and a coordinated outfit then you've probably played it long enough for me to trust you sight-unseen.
If you're a pro player with the default skin, you're gonna have a bad fucking time, because you're last priority for heals, you're not getting an ubercharge, etc. That is gameplay-affecting even if the cosmetic itself is not.
This is the first really good example I've seen of cosmetics having a gameplay effect. I hate that it's true, but I really appreciate you mentioning it -- signalling of skill is super valuable, and if cosmetics are a reliable enough signal, that's interesting.
If you make all skins and cosmetics available to everyone then you're back to square 1 and people will use some other heuristic to decide who they should pass to. I think this is actually an argument for paid cosmetics, it would improve gameplay for the people who spend the most time playing the game by allowing them to identify other people who also dedicate a lot of time and money to the game.
Oh I totally agree that the system right now is majorly screwed up. Loot boxes are absolutely gambling (why else would the odds be legally required to be disclosed in some jurisdictions?)
And of course it's a vanity component (at least for me, though other posters have raised other factors). Everyone's different with different preferences and as long as there's not a problematic spending aspect I think it's fine...but this links back to the gambling issue. Personally I only buy cosmetics in a few games I play a lot and that don't use loot box mechanics.
Why? Why is competitive advantage the only thing that matters?
OP is just ranting about people who pay more getting a better experience, making paying such a central part of gaming. They just hate this, which I agree with, although I know others don't.
In a way, getting a better experience just for being able and willing to pay more is a basic feature of our society. Why should we expect videogames, being as expensive and lucrative, to be radically different from the rest of society?
I'll just continue appreciating those games who are, those who actually work more like art. If I ever decide to try a F2P loot-box generator-style game, it generally puts me off quickly.
IMHO when a game centres around competitive play, and said game also allows you to buy competitive advantage for real money, that is a problem. A situation like this is called "pay to win" and is tempting enough for some game companies to ruin their game with.
> Why? Why is competitive advantage the only thing that matters?
Because it determines whether free players can still compete with paying customers.
There's no problem with a paid weapon skin that just looks cool since everyone is still on a level playing field. If that paid skin gives the user double damage then you've created 2 classes of players and one of them is superior. In such cases, the only reason free players even exist is to serve as fodder for your paying customers. They're there to get wrecked.
> Why? Why is competitive advantage the only thing that matters?
Because unlike the real world, we expect games to be inherently fair and meritocratic. In a competitive game, we expect that no matter how somebody looks or what they may say, the only thing that matters is their ability to perform. This is comparable to why people get upset about, say, the speed-enhancing swimwear for the Olympic games but don't have any problem with that swimwear existing.
One of the central functions of games is to level the playing field, or at least to reduce the dimensionality to such a degree that it is possible to be focused on all influencing factors in a game within the confines of that game. A closed-system, when we're usually all stuck playing in an open-system. Since all real-world closed-systems actually exist within an open-system, of course there could be external influences, but gamers generally have an expectation that attempts will be made to make a game as self-contained and closed as is possible. Pay-to-win games break this contract to make those unwilling to pay into unwitting tools for the enjoyment of the paying customer. They are open-systems under the guise of being closed-systems.
Granted, the category referred to as "Games" now includes many different things, including "Experiences" that aren't really games at all. And there are so many games today that it's pretty easy to find games that are actually games at their core. But there's also plenty of games that are marketed as games but turn out to be significantly about art / fashion to such a degree that they can no longer really be classified as games.
I've got call out Roblox for playing the meta-game here in a way that all gamers frustrated by pay-to-win will appreciate. It takes the idea of a closed system being broken into an open system, and makes that (making F2P games) into a closed system that breaks into an open system: you get to pay-to-win at creating pay-to-win games. A beautiful pyramid scheme that even your 11-yo child can enjoy being exploited within!
While I get the impression that many of those visual bling payables available today seem to give more of a disadvantage than an advantage, back in the days of 1.6 CS I caught myself in real life considering the contrast between what I wore and the environment I was passing through. Not because I was expecting to get shot at (I certainly wasn't), but because at the time it was so much of a routine consideration for me. Yes, visuals can be a competitive factor.
Underlining this comment — Ubisoft games, such as Division or Breakpoint, allow purchase of national camo designs.
If these had no “gameplay” effect or “competitive advantage” based on environment, why do nation states spend money developing them and equip troops differently based on biome?
And why have some games had to patch their PvP to “outline” opposing players with a visibility border in the patches that follow certain “cosmetics”?
A more subtle advantage can arise from hitboxes in both hitscan and projectile games with customizers or cosmetics that change the mesh. There’s a reason some games are predominantly female characters in close fit gear.
Finally, even games that insist no gameplay or competitive advantage, are fully aware of “the meta”.
In Fallout 76, for example, PvP players learned to hotkey the “Nuka-Cola” drinks with special benefits. In a for money store, Bethesda allows you to purchase a robot junk collector that gathers Nuka-Colas for free. Rationale is it is just a QoL (quality of life) benefit, but in reality, it allows stockpiling a combat advantage to last longer in combat than the opponent. Same store also allows you to purchase “repair kits” for weapons and “bubble gum” that suppresses the survival mechanism around eating/drinking for an hour of game play.
Again, Bethesda’s claim is QoL not pay-to-win, but weapons repairable mid-battle away from one’s base certainly affects winning, and level of hunger/thirst affects damage multipliers and action point refresh (aka ‘mana’).
The reality is that they kinda do, people with expensive cosmetics are viewed as being better players by their teammates and opponents. The significance of this can be hard to measure, but in most games it's bigger than a small stat boost that would be immediately seen as p2w
So the less skilled players with expensive cosmetics get their abilities over-estimated while the skilled players in the base skins get their abilities under-estimated. That sounds like a win for the skilled players in the base skins to me. Better to be under-estimated than over-estimated.
> no one would be happy if games shipped without textures and shaders and people would have to pay to unlock them.
Not a meaningful comparison. A game without textures would be hardly playable at all. The same can't be said for skins or accessories to your character/vehicle. You don't get eye-cancer with the default skin. If you feel you need that virtual Louis Vuitton bag to fully enjoy the game then well be a sucker and pay for it and pretend the game was just a little more expensive. I've yet to encounter a game where I feel like I'm missing out on anything with the default player model/skin/car.
That's fine for you. A lot of these games are social experiences. Kids do get called names and bullied for having a default skin. Peer pressure drives a lot of the purchasing of cosmetics. That's why you'll rarely find paid cosmetics in games that don't also feature social aspects.
Yes but that's the point. That's all external and cannot be blamed on the game, or taken to mean the game is incomplete without. Extending on that, there should then also be a ban on fashion and luxury items in any shape or form IRL, as they do the same things to kids (and adults). And a ban on violence in videogames, as I'm sure there's someone out there who's been pushed over the edge by it and committed a crime they otherwise wouldn't have.
So where do we stop? This is just one more way, in addition to the thousands we already have, in which peer pressure and status symbols manifest.
The Rocket Pass is a pretty sweet deal if you play a fair amount. I think it's 10 bucks and you can earn enough credits to get the next season's Rocket Pass.
I don't really muss with my car too much anymore, instead I just click "Equip Now" every time I can and slowly modify it over time.
And just another example. Path of Exile is a game known for its visual clutter when you reach the end game. You have so many mobs and skills flying around it is very difficult to tell what is going on. You can buy cosmetics to make different skill gems appear different when they are cast, including mobs. Often, these alternative skill cosmetics create a greater visual clarity than their default. My point is that if there is a skill that can one-shot kill my character i'd like to see it as clear as day when it is coming. Paying money in Path of Exile gets me that.
> Yes, I really hate this argument that cosmetics are not gameplay.
I don't disagree that they do add something, but theses ones are not something that I want, nor that I need.
> if games shipped without textures and shaders and people would have to pay to unlock them.
I do have to pay for the textures and shaders... I did pay for them as a matter of fact. I didn't pay for the one not included, as I didn't want them. Some did want them, and did pay for them individually. Just like I didn't pay for Elden Ring but plenty did...
Now, when you bought that game, if you were expecting a specific amount of content, and you didn't get that content without paying more, I agree completely, that would be false advertising and that would be definitely wrong.
False advertising is definitely an issue in video games, there's so much overpromising and under-delivering but IAP isn't the issue there (though it definitely can be the reason for your false advertising). Until that part is handled correctly, the market did alleviate most of the false advertising by having an abundant amount of reviews and to me that's a not so bad way to deal with this.
I see it just as price discrimination and I'm fine with it. I can choose to play with "worse" visuals for a lower price. If I want "better" visuals I can pay for that as well. I'm just happy that I have the chance to play for a low cost (sometimes free). I let others who care more about that stuff fund the cost of development. I'm essentially a free-rider.
That of course assumes that the game isn't sold to me with these "better" visuals as included.
Back in the days we used mods and texture packs to remove (hardware) expensive textures from the game so we get more FPS. I'm not sure if your argument applies to all games. For many games there is a competitive scene that usually don't give a shit about visuals and would trade most visual features for more frames per second.
Iam not a real gamer anymore but in World Of warships there are serveral crossover skins (like from animes) that some people love and use and others hate them and are able to turn them off completely.
The hitboxes are the same, so to any seasoned player the visuals really don't matter gameplay wise, as long as the model isn't too out of scale with it's hitbox.
Unless there have been changes in the game, different cars have different hitboxes so technically in this circumstance you might be wrong. Not that there any absolutely amazing car for hitboxes, but there are differences and they affect gameplay.
I assume you're still talking about Rocket League? All models in that game fall under 1 of 6 hitbox types [1], each of which are attainable without purchase
You're strawmanning, they don't ship Rocket League with all the graphics turned off and force you to pay for them. They sell silly hats and skins in addition to the already great graphics that they provide with the base model.
>Monetisation strategies like microtransactions, loot boxes, etc. are also part of the game. However, the goal of such parts is not aligned with that of the others. The game is compromised by the introduction of the monetisation strategies.
This is an interesting point. I think it begs the question, what _is_ the goal of a game? 10 years ago I would have said that broadly, the goal of a video game is to create an experience the player will enjoy. Perhaps now it's more simple though, maybe the goal of the vast majority of games today is to create a model in which money is willingly transferred from the player to the publisher.
That has always been true - not just from the days of Pong, but from the days of Pinball and Pachinko. It's not quite true these games are the equivalent of a bar scam - it's possible to genuinely enjoy a game for its own sake - but addictive rewards and behavioural reinforcements have been around a lot longer than computing has.
The reality is that commercial experience games - where the goal is trigger the imagination and guide the player to a rich experience - are much rarer than commercial extraction games, where the goal is to create addictive engagement and spending patterns which can be monetised.
This isn't nearly as true for tangible commercial board games, especially those that promote strategic and imaginative thinking. You can get started in chess with a chess board and a rule book. You do not have to keep spending money on nicer-looking pieces, and your board will not be monetised with pop-up ads. (Chess sites may be, but chess kept developing for hundreds of years without them.)
D&D and more obscure games like Carcassone are similar. You can spend extra on expansion packs, but even if you buy everything the expansion space is small and bounded. The physical costs of board game dev and distribution keep that true.
Electronic games have a virtually infinite potential expansion space, so the economics are drastically different. The temptation to turn every last thing into a monetisation engine is hard to avoid - to the extent that monetisation design has become a meta-game in its own right.
> Monetisation strategies like microtransactions, loot boxes, etc. are also part of the game. However, the goal of such parts is not aligned with that of the others. The game is compromised by the introduction of the monetisation strategies.
Yup, I think this gets lost in the "visual-only cosmetics are fine/gameplay-affecting is bad" position. The problem is that in most cases, even if the cosmetic is purely visual, games are now being designed around "how do we incorporate cosmetics" which is constraining the types of experiences that are being made and the mechanics they allow.
Battlefield 2042 is an example of a game that completely upended its traditional mechanics to pull in the concept of "operators" (like R6: Siege) because they knew they could make more money selling operators. And at some level that's gameplay affecting, maybe not the ideal picture of what happens when MTX gets involved, but that's always the temptation - "we'll make it gameplay-affecting, but it'll be fair". Once you bring money into the picture you are reliant on developers to take the high road - not just today, but for as long as the game is active/you're interested.
Its predecessor, BFV, was skin-based and it was still controversial not just that you had random Fortnite-style nazi characters running around the Pacific Theater or Japanese Rambo Lady running around Norway, but because they started to introduce tons of animations so that players could at least see the skins they paid $20 a pop for - and that is a basic game-design thing that affects everyone regardless of whether you yourself pay up or not.
At a more basic level, the single-player RPG is essentially dead because it's the most difficult to introduce MTX mechanics into those genre of games. And sure you can point to Elden Ring but even then they are using "cooperative" or "inter-session" mechanics that fundamentally exist as a way to get an "always-online" server system into the picture as a platform for MTX. You've got forced Denuvo on everything. Etc etc.
And again, even when it's done right, there is still an incentive to make the "free" mechanisms grindy so that players feel the urge to pay IRL money. LOTR: Shadow of War was an example of that where the game could technically be finished without MTX, but at a certain point the game ramped the difficulty so hard that it was virtually impossible, certainly impossible without suddenly turning the game into a second job. Many games similarly force hundreds of hours of grinding or... you can just pay and go play with your friends! You can get bait-and-switched once you are into the game and emotionally attached - and that can even occur after release/after reviews have been written, or even just so far into the game that most reviewers don't reach it in their 5 hours of gameplay on their pre-release copy.
Those MTX mechanism are still shaping gameplay mechanics even if they are "purely cosmetic" - and in many cases they are not, they are definitely gameplay-affecting by design (in major AAA/e-sports titles even, this isn't just random mobile crapware, R6:Siege is one of the most popular e-sports titles, LOTR is a mega-IP, etc). Games being designed around "how do we pump the player for cash most efficiently and with the least ability for them to hack around us" is itself a problem either way though, that's a corrosive mindset for game design as a whole that is enabled and encouraged by allowing MTX at all. Either you keep that camel out nose and all, or as soon as that nose is under the tent it's always going to be an insidious urge, and in many cases an explicit mandate from publishers to the studio.
Also, yes, in anything where you interact with another player, your interactions are shaped by the other player's responses to you, which is determined by your cosmetics. I posted this deeper in the thread but to...
If you're at the pro-level, then why does cosmetic choice matter? If it's actually a competitive environment, with people of similar skill levels, then you should be able to have some amount of trust in the skills of other players.
If I were on an actual team of people, I'd expect cosmetics to only matter for at-a-glance identification of a specific player.
because tf2 largely isn't centered around the "pro experience" even if the players are at the top of the playerbase. Comp is its own thing with its own rules, and "casual" gameplay is what the game is designed and balanced around. Comp usually bans about half or 2/3rds of the weapons in the game and imposes additional rules (class limits, no weapons pickups, etc). It's a completely different thing that happens to run on the same engine.
Most games you will play with 23 other randoms who you will never see again after a couple hours. And that is actually the problem - on an actual competitive team your entire team would be decent and everyone would be there to play seriously and get stuff done. But in public games you need some kind of fitness signal to figure out which players are going to be a waste of a team's scarcest resource. How do you tell that from a bunch of players jumping around a spawn room like monkeys for a minute during the setup countdown? Cosmetics. Plumage.
(and actually Valve have gone out of their way over the years to remove other potential signals, like sprays and chat...)
Plumage evolved in nature for a reason, it's still functional and important even though it's "cosmetic-only". Games are a social phenomenon and plumage is still important to them too and that still affects your gameplay too.
In something like TF2, I'd probably rely more on the player's name than what they were wearing. If I recognize the name (even if only in the context of the one match), and know roughly how good they are, I can have my mental preference of who I prioritize.
I usually play Deep Rock Galactic, which has some non-cosmetic ways to judge people's experience. Promotion(like prestige) of a class is indicated by a border color and number of stars, and indicates someone has played a character for promotion25 levels. Bronze stars are okay, silver stars should be decent.
'Blue Levels' are also present. They serve as an indicator of how many times that player has leveled up any* character. So, someone with blue level 100 and only one promotion star should still be considered experienced in terms of game sense, but not necessarily an expert on their character.
Someone with low 'blue levels' and no stars is just a greenbeard, and should not be expected to be great.
The TF2 player base is too big to recognize by name outside of smaller community servers (it's still about 100k peak and this is a fraction of what it was 10 years ago at its historical peak). Sometimes you may see one or two repeat players but mostly it's ships passing in the night and that's OK! There is something to be said for games that everyone is competitive for an hour and then everyone goes home.
There is a similar player level mechanism in TF2 but not tied to classes at all, just a blue level type thing. That works in the starter room, but it's not a solution for the "I have two seconds to choose which of these players to uber before that soldier finishes bombing me"/"I need to pick one of these players to pocket to try and stay alive to keep the uber up for the team".
Plumage works, you can instantly make a call that this is a default player and that one has cosmetics, or recognize the cosmetics of a person who has played well previously/who you gave a chance and they did something antisocial/stupid. Trying to identify a player name, finding them on the scoreboard, and then re-syncing with what has happened in the game in the last 5 seconds just isn't practical.
Like, TF2 has been f2p for 10+ years now, random HNers aren't going to come up with the magic solution here, this is how the game plays regardless of whether you think it should be. It's not a problem, and it's actually one of the least-exploitative MTX mechanisms on the market, but you can't eliminate the effects of cosmetics on gameplay in many situations because plumage is such an important social cue.
If you want an example of cosmetics that don't affect anything - Battlefield 1 has a fixed selection of guns and then each gun has some skins. Nobody else can really see the particular skin at range anyway so no real gameplay effect. This was done deliberately to allow the character design to be visually distinctive - a british medic runs around with crutches on their back for example, and the british scout wears a cape. Can't have that with cosmetics unless they're so trivial that nobody can tell they're there (BF1), or you go to great efforts to preserve character silhouettes (TF2). In BFV it's much much more difficult to tell the classes apart - any class can run around with a medic hat on for example! An elite skin can be any class - you have to visually identify what guns and items they're carrying, which is more challenging even if it's "just cosmetic" - a mere cosmetic gives you a tactical advantage, you know what your enemy is carrying and they have to guess about you.
And that's obviously because BFV was much more oriented around MTX sales, while BF1 focused on an "expansion pack" model.
So MTX clearly affects that aspect of game design even if it's "only cosmetic".
I feel like your arguments on plumage could equally be applied to lower-cost cosmetics, to the point where being able to recognize that someone is 'that specific Heavy', is more important than 'a Heavy with the limited-release Sandvich Holster', and probably easier/faster.
The holster is rare, and maybe you recognize that it's rare, but they could have just gotten it out of a drop and kept it. The Heavy with the funny flip-flops and sunglasses is probable more recognizable at-a-glance, but could have bought a bunch of cheap cosmetics for a few dollars on the market.
And in the case of keeping an uber ready, won't you have to stay pocketed long enough to learn if someone is a good or less-good choice? Even if it's raining hell on your position, you'd have a rough view of the Heavy and a kill feed that highlights the assists you're getting from them. What more is there to look for?
As for the Battlefield games you mention, my biggest issue in 5 was that all of the player models seemed to blend into the background. Most of the time, I wasn't able to spend brainpower trying to figure out who is which type of class, simply because I was too busy trying to figure out if some dull, misshapen blob was part of the map or trying to kill me. Combined with the general feel of the game (poor, imo), I was never motivated to spend enough time on it to get into anything serious. Haven't bought another Battlefield game since, and BF5 was on a steep sale at the time.
> you can point to Elden Ring but even then they are introducing "cooperative" mechanics that fundamentally exist as a way to get an "always-online" server system into the picture as a platform for MTX.
What? Co-op/PvP has been a major part of From Software's souls games going back to Demon's Souls in 2009. They can also be played entirely offline if you wish and have zero microtransactions or Denuvo.
> At a more basic level, the single-player RPG is essentially dead because it's the most difficult to introduce MTX mechanics into those genre of games. And sure you can point to Elden Ring but even then they are using "cooperative" or "inter-session" mechanics that fundamentally exist as a way to get an "always-online" server system into the picture as a platform for MTX. You've got forced Denuvo on everything. Etc etc.
Have you ever heard of thing called fashion souls? A lot of times I wear armour (pick and choose pieces) because it looks cool not because it have bigger numbers.
Not only that, sometimes they can affect the basic mechanics too. For example, some guns in Destiny 2 the range is measured from the end of the weapon model, and some skins extend the model out so the gun is further from the player. This in a one v. one scenario can give you a slight edge on one shot kill distance if you have the skin, so you can shoot earlier than an opponent without it.
you and everyone else concerned about the preying on vulnerable thing should be aware that we have literally no evidence that such a thing is happening. the absolute worst thing we know off in practice are extreme edge cases (i.e. not applying to 99% of people even within the whale demographic) of above average earners spending their money on waifu shit instead of buying themselves a car they don't need.
the more regularly occuring thing is probably that parent's don't properly set up their kids phones and then they buy a few hundred or worse thousands bucks of something they shouldn't. but again those occurances are rare and don't cause really cause any actual damage, especially since you can get refunds for this stuff if it gets expensive very easily. kids regularly do stuff a lot more expensive than that. in fact kids themselves are a lot more expensive than that as a baseline.
the supposed exploitation of things like loot boxes has literally zero evidence behind it. all you will find are a few genuinely bottom of the barrel studies (as in that australian government study from some years ago, should literally be taken as an example in a book of how not to run a study).
and the constant comparison to gambling is really tiresome, because it's obviously not the same. people play themselves out of all their belongigs regularly with actual gambling, because their goal is to make a profit with gambling and their last gamble will surely turn it around. such a thing isn't possible even in the few online gaming markets remaining where you can resell your items for real money because its a big hazzle to liquidize all your assets.
People often contrast loot boxes with Magic the Gathering: "At least you can resell your cards", but this makes it more like gambling, not less! CS:Go has far greater potential for economic harm & fraud--due to resale--than the much hated Star Wars loot boxes.
"It's only cosmetics shop" is a cancer that's killing AAA game industry. Games are designed from ground up not being fun themselves but to be filled with dark patterns, ads, artificial focus on the shop items and so on.
Even with Rocket League microtransactions are a bad idea. It incentivizes the developer to make attaining items through gameplay a slog in order to get you to skip that by paying up. If there was no way to get those items through mtx, they'd make the process of getting them fun.
Also, games are supposed to be a form of escapism, where the gameplay matters, not who you are and how much money your parents make.
You can argue in favor of the game itself being free allowing people to save 10 or 20 bucks. But gameplaywise Microtransactions inevitably make the gameplay experience worse, without exceptions.
Anectdata: I have over 2000 hours of Rocket League, never once spent any money on it after purchasing it and never one have I felt that my fun was impacted by the available microtransactions.
Nothing that can be purchased in the game affects gameplay, it's all just cosmetics.
It seems to be the most common item people buy (because it can actually slightly affect your performance as it better matches the hitbox, and it is the most used competitively). I know a lot of people who never bought a single item, except for the fennec.
The fennec hitbox is the same as the Octane, but the design of the car better matches the hitbox compared to the Octane. So you can be more precise with your touches.
I can't believe how many people care about the cosmetics, I've been playing RL for years, unlocked heaps of things to wear but never changed the appearance of my car once. All I really care about is playing and trying to win, although sometimes other peoples cars do look cool, I have no desire to update mine.
Yeah, cosmetic items are the least bad solution to this problem since they provide zero advantage to players. They're there for people who want to look cool online which is fine.
Paying for items that impact the game balance turns them into spending competitions: whoever pays the company the most money wins. Games designed like this are not even worth playing. I fell for one of these money sinks once, never again.
Plus having cosmetic items essentially subsidizes the game for everyone, aka its free because money can be made off those that want to spend on cosmetics.
There are market places for selling items, both for in game cash and real money. I agree that it’s a legitimate criticism that it’s not in actual game itself, but then you develop weird incentive structures like FIFA’s pack openings taking precedence over actually playing soccer, which also feels bad, and potentially more exploitative (if I just hit this rare car I could turn a profit!!)
I think it is a problem though when a game's revenue mostly comes from cosmetics, as it shifts the developer incentives away from "developing a game that lots of people want to buy and play" to "making the type of game that lends itself well to lots of cosmetic micro transactions". These are often pretty different types of games and it would be sad if the former were entirely replaced by the latter.
Fundamentally the biggest driver of selling cosmetics is still just the size of your player base. Companies are still really out there trying to make sure people play their games. Exceptions exist (I'm looking at you mobile games), but for the most part I don't see a massive shift in incentives.
IMO the big change is to do with the lifecycle of games. Previously you release a new title, maybe a few DLCs, and then you move on. The game is done, you have to do something else, a sequel, a new IP, whatever. That was true for all games, multiplayer included. Now (for multiplayer) the idea is to try different releases until one sticks, and then try and make that game evergreen. The dream being something like League of Legends, which has been printing money for over a decade.
Whether that's a good or bad thing is up for debate I suppose.
This reminds me of an old trick from the Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare days. You could edit the player model skins locally if you had the correct Photoshop plugins installed. Players would just spray over the character model skins with blaze orange so you could pick people out from across the map, even if they were hiding in deep vegetation. Eventually the 'pro-mod' developers caught on and implemented some client side hash checking but the public non 'pro-mod' servers were never protected against this afaik
Cosmetics are not nearly that resource intensive to produce, so its not about 'wearing nice clothes' a-la real life, where good materials are more expensive to produce. Attaching a price tag is PURELY for the benefit of the publisher.
Attaching real world costs to purchases in games also disproportionately targets neurodivergent and fiscally uneducated people. That seems like a fairly malicious business practice.
Microtransaction apologism is not a tractable stance, ever.
There is still the value of creating the model asset, though I agree that it’s a cost that doesn’t scale with how many people buy it (except for maybe some of the song packs, not sure how RL’s royalty package is structured).
Why does attaching real world costs to purchases in-game strike you as “malicious” but not the real world cost of buying the game?
The first issue is that like I originally mentioned, microtransactions disproportionately affect neurodivergent individuals because of the addictive mechanics used to implement them. The concept of 'whales' is a term used to refer to big spenders in a game economy without fully examining the reason they are spending so much. For example, where you can only buy one copy of Elden Ring, you could easily buy a new copy of Forza every year and buy each car, which may be a compulsion if you have OCD, for example. The same argument could be (and should be) made against tiered subscription services in games. If there is a lootbox mechanic involved, the issue is only compounded further as it is an introduction of gambling mechanics. In some cases, it can be worth examining the presence of envy economics 'Oooh I want was they have! How much is it? Oh I want it more now I know!'.
The second issue is the scale difference is ridiculous. The amount of dev and artist time to produce a game sits at around 1.5 to 4 years and sometimes much more. There is a large number of artistic assets that are used in combination with code when making a game and those assets are paid for using the proceeds from the game sales. When micro transactions are produced, a fraction of those assets are divided out of the main game (or less often, added later) and can be produced on a 6 month cycle to be sold separately. To be explicit, the amount of assets made in a microtransaction is FAR less than those used to make the game, but often the price of the microtransaction does not reflect this (again, refer to Forza and the $200 car dlc for a minimum-$100 game). This means that either the publisher or the developer team (including art team) is receiving that margin, and if you think the developers are receiving a proportionate amount of that margin then I have some bad news for you.
To be clear, I think game monetisation is OK. But that does not mean all forms of monetisation are OK, and it definitely does not mean that diluting a product in a harmful way is OK.
There is a real world equivalent which affects many more people. Wearing nice clothes might mean wearing well-made clothes, or wearing branded clothes. Although there is some correlation, there are definitely examples of moderate quality clothes being sold for insane prices because of a brand.
Not to say that micro transactions are good practice or that they can’t be dealt with independently, but micro transactions are a very similar problem to real world cosmetics.
Sure you could argue that just having some correlation between true quality and perceived value is good enough, but I’d argue that charging for more visually appealing and better designed models ALSO is not zero correlation.
Yeah, I just avoid sucky games that do shit like that. You should too. Those "video games have become" apparently the ones you chose to play and not the ones you didn't choose to play...
^ I can’t speak for which 424 games you have in your library, but careful with the terminology—there are (sadly) lots of paid games with microtransactions and dark patterns.
There's a lot to dislike, but my gripes as a developer who occasionally dabbles in games are more along the lines of "this puzzle game prototype is interesting and may be worth polishing up and tossing on steam, but oh right, it won't even pay for itself unless I turn it into yet another gambling machine."
Yeah, people blame the developers, blame the publishers, but I think the sad truth is, gamers themselves shoulder much of the blame. Somehow the public came to believe that everything should be free. Maybe it was the internet? Maybe it was sites/apps like Facebook?
Regardless, when a great piece of software that happens to have a price tag fails to sell, whose fault is that?
Don't blame developers/publishers for going instead to the only model that pays the bills these days.
IMO, it’s the platforms that turn down novel ideas in preference for money making products, resulting in less visibility for the underdog. Apple’s App Store routinely promotes paid for apps over free ones. Steam does the same. Google search is obviously the worst offender.
Why blame anyone? Gamers get the content they want in the way they prefer to pay for it, developers and publishers get paid.
The market has pretty clearly spoken and decided that people prefer cosmetic micro transactions with free to play games. Just because it doesn’t match the Hacker News gaming utopia template doesn’t mean anyone is doing anything wrong.
This is especially true for multiplayer games where a lot of children don’t have money to buy the game but their presence on the platform adds value to the people who do have money to spend on it.
That's not true though. No game lives off the general public buying a few cosmetics. It lives off a few addicted people buying thousands of dollars worth, while the vast majority pay nothing. It's a terrible business model that will hopefully be outlawed in the coming decade.
I had assumed those "few addicted people buying thousands of dollars worth" were instead just people with a lot of disposable income.
You could be right though, and it is addiction. That would in fact be uncool.
My only data-point though is a friend of mine who has spent hundreds of dollars (or more?) on Star Citizen ships and he is the disposable-income kind of gamer.
There are combinations of both, for sure. But there was an interview some time ago on Eurogamer about a super spender (thousands of pounds) on Candy Crush who was awarded some airplane tickets to attend a Candy Crush convention, but she couldn't afford tickets to get to the airport...
This video by Jim Sterling is a good overview of how knowingly sinister microtransactions truly are, with a couple narrated testimonies of people who fell for them despite not being able to afford them.
> The market has pretty clearly spoken and decided that people prefer cosmetic micro transactions with free to play games.
All that the market discovered is that there is a huge number of "whales" that can be exploited. The "fun" will begin once the whales have squandered their money and will either leave entirely or, and that's the scenario I fear, some (or someone's relatives) will raise a sob story in front of their local newspaper or politician... ending in a repeat of the early 2000s with videogames being blamed as a whole for the excesses of a few, and religious and other moral fundamentalists getting ahead.
I also think “Why blame anyone?”, but not because there’s no problem. Just because it doesn’t make sense to blame individuals for market movements.
Markets are powered by billions of instances of “what someone wants” but that doesn’t mean the resulting market movements are always a good indicator of what everyone wants as an environment. Sometimes aggregate human activity results in a crappy experience for most participants. “The market has spoken” is a glib, ideological phrase that can be used to dismiss any discussion about ways we could steer and improve markets to make them do a better job at facilitating human happiness and flourishing.
Same thing for airlines. I hate the argument "consumers decided they wanted smaller seats, no free food or drinks, etc by buying the cheapest tickets." People just tried to get the best deal possible in the market, they aren't analyzing which airline has the best seats and amenities and making their decision from there.
> This is especially true for multiplayer games where a lot of children don't have money to buy the game but their presence on the platform adds value
Playing a competitive FPS game casually with all age groups is lot of more fun and attractive to most gamers a la Apex/Warzone/Fortnite/Valorant/CSGO.
By charging up front you remove an enormous player base and create a worse matchmaking experience for all players. Long gone are the days of buy a Call of Duty game for Christmas.
> The market has pretty clearly spoken and decided that people prefer cosmetic micro transactions with free to play games.
I wonder how many people on HN complaining about this model actually even consider themselves gamers.
I'm a gamer. I spend 30-40 hours/week on PC games. I think the "Free-to-play with paid cosmetics" (Apex Legends, Rocket League, Splitgate, tons of other games that follow this model) is perfectly fine.
I think part of the problem is that it's hard to have a conversation about this model because someone will always make references to games that are pay-to-win (Most mobile games) or gate content behind a paywall (Not sure which games do this today), which are an entirely different beast and not a part of the conversation.
EDIT: Just remembered League of Legends. It gates content (characters to play) behind progression, or you can pay money to unlock them immediately. But paid characters aren't necessarily more powerful, and they're constantly making adjustments to characters to try to keep them balanced. Any experienced player will tell you that paying money for a character perceived as being overpowered is foolish as it's guaranteed they'll eventually get nerfed.
Artificial scarcity is bad, actually. Things that don't cost money to duplicate should be free, we need UBI and maybe a general shift to patronage-based models, luckily this is starting to happen.
There are also plenty of games that implement a cometic lootboxes that don't impact gameplay model that are totally fine.
Fair enough, it's not a great comment. I don't really know how society should be run, and I shouldn't have offhandedly emphasized a couple things that I think might lead us to a solution.
That being said I'll stand by artificial scarcity being bad thing and clarify that while I don't have some master plan on how to create a functioning society where we don't have to impose artificial scarcity on the digital world; I absolutely think that is something we should be dedicating a lot of effort to. I reject the premise that we need to deny some people things that can be copied essentially for free.
> That being said I'll stand by artificial scarcity being bad thing and clarify that while I don't have some master plan on how to create a functioning society where we don't have to impose artificial scarcity on the digital world; I absolutely think that is something we should be dedicating a lot of effort to. I reject the premise that we need to deny some people things that can be copied essentially for free.
Again this just sounds like an emotional argument -- you seem convinced on a purely intuitive level that artificial scarcity is bad without actually explaining rationally how the harm it does outweighs the benefits.
There is a _very simple_ argument (which I'm not claiming is _true_ in all cases, but it is at least compelling, so anyone claiming the contrary needs to address it) in favor of artificial scarcity: taking away a major monetization strategy (often the only viable one) massively reduces the incentive to create high-quality products and we all end up poorer for those cultural outputs not existing.
> taking away a major monetization strategy (often the only viable one) massively reduces the incentive to create high-quality products and we all end up poorer for those cultural outputs not existing.
Ahahaha, to be quite honest I don't find that argument compelling at all. Profit motives seem to be making software much much worse, not better, compared to what I know is possible. I'm often finding myself reverse engineering/hacking things just to make them usable. From where I'm standing the current system is not doing a very good job. I can often make notable usability improvements in the systems I interact with and IP laws, the main driver of digital artificial scarcity generally prevent me from sharing them. I feel like I'm constantly fighting hostile software that's just trying to extract value from me in some way rather than actually solving my problems.
While my original comment is not my best work by any stretch (sorry), I implore you to reconsider the idea that all motivation is monetary (it's absolutely not) and that patronage must happen on a "platform" that will become corrupt in some way. I think discounting the possibility of novel systems that tackle these problems out of hand is not a good way to start.
This is like saying we should blame the smoker, the junkie, or the gambling addict. The latter is an especially accurate comparison because these companies turn their games into gambling machines.
Sure, personal responsibility is important. In the end the only person who can free an addict from the quagmire of addiction is them. But that doesn't stop us from regulating the fuck out of tobacco companies, heroin dealers or casinos to reduce the harm they do to their victims.
The elephant in the room is that we as an industry hold the power to alter people's psychology on a greater scale than any drug. But people stay silent because it delivers the paychecks and the shareholder returns...
The other option is to apparently blanket your game with advertisements. I spent some time yesterday looking for word games in the iOS store, and it seems like everything was “free”, but had non stop, unskippable ads. One offered to remove ads for a fee, but even after paying they remained in various parts of the game.
Some of that is that Apple's App Store search remains the worst search engine I'm forced to use, but some of it is evaporative cooling from Apple Arcade.
Most of the decent games have migrated there. I barely use it, but I think it works out to two bucks with the other iStuff I'm happy to pay for, and having a few games on my tablet or phone can be nice when I'm traveling.
What exactly makes you think as someone who "dabbles in games" to be entitled to profit?
AFAIK it costs $100 +30% to publish on Steam. It only takes 260 people to buy your game at 50 cents to break even. If your game can't sell 260 copies at 50 cents then it's just that, worthless.
Why not just release your game for free, for free? Does it have to be on Steam? Does it have to make money?
> AFAIK it costs $100 +30% to publish on Steam. It only takes 260 people to buy your game at 50 cents to break even. If your game can't sell 260 copies at 50 cents then it's just that, worthless.
It doesn't take zero time to ship a bespoke finished game, your calculus is asinine.
The difference between someone who "dabbles in games" and a professional is that the professional polishes up the prototype and sells it on Steam. The commenter above explained why the state of the industry has prevented them from doing that. Your weird tangent asking "why do you feel entitled to make money for your work?" isn't really relevant to the conversation.
Seems to me like making a reasonable amount of money to help towards these goals is not an unreasonable thing to hope for. But maybe you can prove me wrong?
I chastised a friend for getting so upset after losing half a dozen travelers checks on vacation. Get a grip — it’s $2 worth of paper. If you can’t afford to replace that you can’t afford to be on vacation.
For me, I think the concern with Travelers Checks is the potential loss of money from your account, if someone is able to forge your signature on them, and how that might potentially be used to tie you to other events or crimes that may have occurred.
I'm genuinely confused by this. Are you saying that you shouldn't have to worry about eating and living indoors? Or are you saying that you literally forget people have to pay for those things? Can you please explain what you mean?
That depends on how good the concept is! Plenty of indie games have succeeded without gambling mechanics, look at something like Baba Is You for instance. I don’t know that the developer became rich off of it but be seems to have done well enough.
This only works if you either already have a brand like Zachatronics or if you have the patience to support/polish these small games for years till the random slot machine of the universe drops you enough reviews that you get critical mass and decent sales… or you pay for PR and you can successfully profit from even a shit game with enough PR money so why bother at that point…
Your right about a good concept winning a lot of good will and making success possible with less polish, but these days it doesn’t subtract the “risk of never being discovered” if you make an iOS app your just one of millions in the App Store if it’s on steam the shovelware isn’t as bad and discovery is better but it still requires market understanding in order to stand out.
The reason I referenced Baba Is You is because that concept was so incredibly brilliant, I legitimately believe you could have dropped the game into five parallel universes and it would have gotten attention every single time. Just get the game in front of one journalist for five minutes, and they'll very quickly see how brilliant it is.
Discovering a game concept like that is hard, but it does happen.
There are still a ton of solid games that aren't constantly asking for money. TLOU, Elden Ring, RDR2 to name three huge ones. I'm 50/50 on Ubisoft because their games are still great standalone, but do offer IAP that I just ignore.
I'm OK with those offering freemium and such so long as it doesn't kill off the old model. I don't think it will.
There are countless indie games out there too worth all your time and more. If you like elden ring you need to experience the whole soulsborne series. AAA games are as trash as they've ever been.
Elden Ring is published by Bandai Namco, which makes it an AAA game; Bandai Namco is larger than Ubisoft which is where most of the "AAA = bad" games are from.
The problem with Ubisoft's model is that it affects game balance. Before when there's a problem with a game, the developers will patch it for free. Now, solutions are sold as IAP. It's even worse when the problems are now intentional.
Game trainers exist, at least on PC and Android. I feel no qualms about using trainers to grant myself unlimited in-game currency rather than buying their IAP ones.
Personally I enjoy games that bring a good challenge with the tools provided. The existence of IAP gates those tools or artificially inflates the challenge e.g. buy level boosts because the game purposely give little experience.
I find giving myself unlimited resources (e.g. with cheat codes in the old days or with credit cards today) greatly diminishes the experience. At that point, why even bother playing? There's other mediums of entertainment that makes colors splash on monitors.
Sure, it doesn't have to be unlimited resources, you can give yourself however much you feel would balance the game to your fairness level. I just meant that it's one way to remove IAP gates as you mention.
Oh come on... GTA(3, VC, SA) with cheats were great games to play... get all the weapons, be invincible, destroy everything, instead of a baseball bat, use a rocket launcher, instead of a bike, drive a tank.
I will say that RDR Online pushes you hard towards micro transactions. That said, the single player game is worth $60 on its own, so I don’t mind just skipping the online.
I’m not a fan of loot boxes or “free to play,” but it’s hard to take this complaint about dark patterns seriously on a site with a blocking popup and back-button jankiness.
Yeah I always wonder about the click-through rates of popovers asking users to install a native app. They have to be tiny.
“Like our content? Install our app so we can send you notifications and monetise you better!” - no, I’m not enjoying your content. I haven’t even read any of it yet. Your obnoxious pop up is the only content I’ve seen so far and it makes me want to pour water in your server rack. I’m not going to install your app.
The old ways persist. Good games are easier than ever to find and in great quantity. So what, now you want lawsuits and legislation to destroy the fremium model? I'll just be over hear playing games I want to play, unaffected by the network effect because I don't care what strangers play. I play with my friends and we play games that are old, indie, fun, run on anyone's machine, and can be played in person on a couch if we want. There's free bots for discord poker with friends. There's countless pick up and play fremium online titles to chose from. There's decades' worth of system's libraries available on emulators. What are you complaining about again?
Honest question: I understand the gripes about lootboxes being toxic because gambling systems are generally manipulative, but I don't know how to respond to "Just don't buy them". They don't affect gameplay, they're really just there as whale bait, but if you're invested in the game you don't necessarily have to get invested in cosmetics.
The only two games I play these days both happen to be gacha games, and actually I see a lot less complaints about the toxicity of these luck-based systems in those communities. Maybe it's because they're more used to them, maybe it's because most other gacha games include pity systems, but it seems weird to me that the most vocal complaints are over systems with no bearing on gameplay when gacha games limit free access to new characters and, by extension, progress.
This opinion might vary by the person and the game. I was playing some free-to-play game the other day which was like you described - it had a store and some tokens, and a way to slowly gain the premium token as you played.
But I found there to be something deeply gross about it which did impact my gameplay experience. I’m playing a game (rather than doing something else) because I want a curated experience of fun. Tokens like this make the relationship adversarial. In this case, the game has some mechanics which it keeps waving in your face - “quick! Click now to spend 2 whatevers to have a 4 hour boost!” And I have to actively avoid the shiny fun part because it costs real money to do. It makes the experience tiring in the same way shopping is tiring. Is the game trying to be fun or not? Pick a lane.
That said, I enjoyed Dota2 for many years even though it had hat stores and loot boxes full of art. I’m not sure what the difference is - I think I just never really had to resist the pull to pull out my credit card in dota. And I payed way more as a result! I chipped in a few dollars each year for the international prize pool, and that was a blast.
The difference is that the game was competitive and the cosmetics had 0 impact on the game mechanics itself. Other games like you describe constantly remind you that you don't have enough credits to buy the thing, you're earning them just at a rate too slow to matter. You're always being nudged to think about the mtx system and it's a core aspect of the gameplay and it's exhausting.
For me it makes a game feel like a second job. I'm not wealthy so I'm trying to save and make something for myself but playing these games just feels like experience the same dread and fear i have in reality.
1) "Whales" keep nearly all of these games going. "Vote with your wallet" is a misnomer because in typical democratic systems a vote is a vote; but capitalism isn't a democracy and a very small portion of the playerbase will actually sustain the game near-singlehandedly. Its not a situation where enough people don't buy it and the game company changes; its a situation where enough people don't buy it, and are missing out on a piece of the game due to not buying it, while the elite 0.1% buy everything.
2) "They don't alter gameplay". That's an interesting argument. Take a game like Animal Crossing; would being able to buy a sweet ass new table for your house "alter gameplay"? Isn't aesthetic the gameplay? I truly and deeply believe that its difficult to draw this line in any game; where the "gameplay" stops and suddenly the "stuff that doesn't matter so sell it" starts; if the product has value, such that people buy it, then it must be an important part of the game. It may not affect the competitive balance, but that isn't the entire game; the developers put time into the visual aesthetic of the game, and to assert that the items are ok to sell simply because they don't affect the gameplay trivializes the items' importance.
Moreover, in a much smaller way; in every game I've played, these items do affect competitive balance. Often in subtle ways. In Valorant, having a cool gun skin can often mean eight year olds on your team asking for you to buy the gun for them, so they can use it (sometimes, promising a re-buy in return, then not doing it lol). In Apex Legends, some hero outfits legitimately camouflage you with the environment than others. In Dead By Daylight, the Feng Ming wearing the bright pink jacket will be tunneled by the killer more than everyone else wearing drab browns and torn jeans. To assert "the way you look doesn't impact the gameplay" is trivially and wholly, if not sometimes subtly, incorrect; games are visual, looking good asserts a socioeconomic power structure which can impact team cooperation, all of this does matter.
But, to clarify; gaming companies need to make money. For online service games, its not enough to just sell the game for $70 and call it good for life; even doing so can be a death sentence for the game, as the barrier to entry is so high no one joins in to even play. Loot boxes are extremely bad, and games which sell them should be held to the same legal standards as gambling (Overwatch, Apex Legends, Rocket League, DOTA2, CS:GO, etc). A cash-for-item storefront is better (Fortnite, Valorant, Warzone, Dead by Daylight, Sea of Thieves, Halo Infinite, etc). Battle Passes are probably one of the best solutions I've seen yet; they're effectively an optional subscription service to the game, with resetting progression (players love progression). Pure subscription services are rare, but also a great solution; CS:GO has one, but WoW was the better example; there was a time when you simply paid to play, and everything cool you could get was bundled into that subscription. Today, things have changed, and they're double-dipping revenue models, like most of the games listed above.
I don't think "just don't buy them" is meant as a wallet vote here. It looks more like a prompt to spend your resources on things you enjoy rather than things you don't enjoy. There is as far as I can tell no shortage of PC games that you only have to pay for once. I have hundreds of games on just my Steam account, of which only a handful will ask for change for some hats or whatever; things I deemed irrelevant to my enjoyment when I got them.
I only play Dota and no other game and I think how the game works is extremely fair. It's free to play. For all. Can you believe that? And it only charges you for skins that have no competitive edge. How is that not fair? I mean there's not a single dark ui pattern to trick you into doing it.
If you only care about yourself, sure - "just don't buy them" is a good answer. The problem comes when you look at the industry level, at the games that get allowed to be made, and at the people they hurt.
The vast majority of "free to play" games would not be able to make a profit of they didn't find a few players willing to spend huge amounts of money on them. Thousands of dollars, from people who often can't afford to spend thousands of dollars on a hobby.
And not only are these games sustained by such people, they actively seek to find and exploit them, with game mechanics and presentation designed to hook a certain kind of psyche - people with gambling or other mental issues, and children.
Video games are like this because people pay for it. It didn’t start like this. Back when packaged games (i.e. shrink-wrapped cd/dvd cases) were the way games were delivered we had “online” modes that generally cost a fixed amount (including $0) to access. Then someone would experiment with something like a power up or level up for some tiny cost, or a “bundle” of them, etc. and guess what: the market overwhelmingly went for it. It made more money because it both had higher per-transaction revenue and more people converting to pay it. Then came the whales (things like Saudi princes blowing $10s or $100s of thousands on FIFA cards or whatever) and the industry never looked back.
Video games are what they are for the same reason Marvel Character CGI-fest Sequel/Spinoff X blows away the box office every summer.
Actually there's a strong power law going on with microtransactions. Most players don't spend any money at all on them; some spend a couple bucks on an item or two. The model becomes profitable because of the top 1% of spenders — "whales," in industry parlance — some of whom have deeply unhealthy relationships to the gambling mechanics and social pressures underlying microtransaction economies.
So it's not exactly true that the public are voting with their wallets here. It's a profitable business model, but the majority of people do not engage with it, and consumers as a whole would be better-off if it died out.
Right, so the market is being disproportionately swayed by gambling addicts and the experiences which appeal to them. This is not a healthy state of affairs.
Perhaps. There are a lot of games that are not like that though, catering to gambling, and I presume even in the future many games will not as well. There is always a group of people who like games without stuff like that in there, and it seems like at least some of these game creators do quite well, such as CDPR with their Witcher and Cyberpunk series.
It sounds to me like what you are saying is that developers have discovered it is best to offer an amazing free product to the whole world in order to get them involved in the game, and then this attracts rich people, who then go ahead and pay for the whole things themselves. But if you don't attract the little guy with free stuff, you don't get a great game, and so you don't attract the rich people.
Seems like a good system that everyone happy with. If they weren't happy they would go play other games that aren't free.
Some games are starting to remove the gambling. The article's author is outdated on Rocket League which has since removed the lootboxes. Valorant never had any.
In all fairness, Rocket League may be the only "free to play" game that warrants the term "amazing". I'm glad it keeps something like RL around, but let's be real: this game model tends to rake in the cash even with the most generic games.
Frankly I'm torn: people can buy digital stickerbomb skins if they want, but it's obviously a bit of a "cheat code" to a profitable game and probably takes a lot of developers/money away from more interesting parts of the industry.
It'd also be more forgivable if it didn't seem popularity creates nearly immortal games that too often become stagnant and overrun with toxic players despite still being profitable enough to "keep alive", i.e. payday 2, planetside 2
Reminds me again of "when you don't have to pay for it, you're the product, not the customer". Here, all the free players are opponents necessary to attract the whales.
But that applies even to paid games. It's very hard to attract players to games if it's mainly multiplayer and there's no one to play against. Both players and developers do want an active playerbase, and free to play significantly lowers the barrier of entry for potential players.
So maybe free-to-play simply has to be the future of multiplayer games?
And yet they put me off because you're constantly confronted with mechanisms designed to make you pay. I don't mind paying for a game, but once I'm playing, I want to focus on the game, not the payment.
Hardly. The whales are not always rich: often they’re just addict-type personalities who are extremely irresponsible with their money.
It’s not a healthy business model for consumers, but ever since I saw the start of this industry trend I’ve come to view consumers of it (in aggregate) as being of poor judgement if not outright stupid. So they kind of reap what they sew, and the rest of us must work harder to find quality. Just like in everything else really.
It is almost like the business models are adjusting to the reality of the world.
With massive inequality, especially in a global market. And an "entitlement" that digital products should be free or dirt cheap.
If you think about it it's sort of a wealth redestribution. One extreme example was that Movie ticket business, that basically paid movie tickets with investor money.
This presumes the whales can afford to spend the way they do. Which isn’t true for gambling addicts either. And that the profits end up in the hands of workers rather than in the pockets of investors.
The megawhale point is a bit overmade. F2p games have vastly different payer distributions by genre, platform, business model, monetization strategy and other factors.
Addictiveness and addiction are issues with and around gaming, for sure. But the reliance of f2p games on entranced, pixel-charmed addicts is also overstated. A good number of free to play games have lifespans measured in decades, they can function like a highly social, off-and-on hobby. People are willing to spend $20 to go to the movies a few times per year. How’s it different to spend that on a game you get hundreds of hours of entertainment from?
It's not always gambling. There are also collectors and people who just like to show off. Also, the usually f*ing rich dude who has no understanding on the difference between $2 and $20k. Games today are the new social club, where you go and meet and show off your life. And as there are corners for the average people, there are also corners for the rich and powerful. There are some games which really just exist so rich dudes can casually meet and show off how much money they spend on some stupid skin. Similar, some other games have pay2win, because enough rich people live by the philosophy that money can buy you anything, including an easy win.
The gambling-games are only the most obvious whale-traps, and they usually not even aim for the filthy rich, but the middle class rich. The rich rich-games are less obvious, because the casuals are not rich enough to even get high enough in that game to gain access to the juicy parts.
> There are some games which really just exist so rich dudes can casually meet and show off how much money they spend on some stupid skin.
Possibly, but not in the mainstream market. I'm not concerned with some weird niche luxury thing that 8 rich guys are doing. And as far as the mainstream market goes, the "rich guy to whom money means nothing" is not the average whale. Most whales (as I recall) are of fairly average means.
>Video games are like this because people pay for it.
I hate this argument because it implies you have any power in this situation. They don't do this because the majority likes it, they do it because there's a select group of whales that are willing to spend ungodly amounts of money on this crap. They're the ones who dictate how these games operate and no amount of "vote with your wallet" would change it.
Yeah no. There are still plenty of games, both indie and non-indie, which millions of players who don't whale can play, containing at most DLC which is effectively an expansion on top of an otherwise complete base game. If you don't want to play these games, there are still plenty of options. Enough developers haven't sold their souls yet, either.
Reality is, the market meets a demand where there is a demand. The developers are not the sole responsible people for choosing to put in gambling gimmicks, incomplete games for 25-60 bucks, DLC which should've been base, P2W, etc. There is just as much of a responsibility on customers to vote with their money, or vote for laws to ban this shit if it becomes evident people can't control themselves as a whole. We haven't reached the critical mass where you don't have other options yet, and it looks like we won't for quite some time.
Meanwhile almost every indie trying to fit in the market and come with their passionate solution is met with a dire reality that selling games takes a tremendous amount of effort for anyone who doesn't have a giant brand behind them.
> I hate this argument because it implies you have any power in this situation.
Yes you do. While there is little we actually control in our complex world, we are at least in control of our discretionary purchasing decisions. Sure, you as an individual might not make a dent in the company's profits but thats not the point. You are making a decision on principle, thats all that matters.
If we cant get this part right, what hope do we have for more important stuff like voting in actual elections?
I'll be the first person to jump on the hatewagon towards pay2win and lootbox gacha games, but...hear me out. You can just NOT play those games.
The amount of games available on Steam is such that you can play indie games, old classics and anything to your liking for decades, while completely avoiding the types of game the author laments about.
There were plenty of just horrible, bad games back in the day too. Games that would crash all the time, had terrible gameplay, graphics, story, you name it. You just avoided the bad ones.
1. Most art is like the example given, not just video games. For the avengers, you can watch the movies at the theatre but you need to pay another $10/mo for Disney+ to watch their tv series. Art, NFTs. Etc.
2. There are many games that aren’t loot box-esque. To say “video games have become this” is very unfair.
There's definitely a tasteful way to do this model. Dota 2, Fortnite, and Brawlhalla are examples of good ways to do this. To me, it comes down to two things:
1. Should not be able to purchase a competitive advantage
2. Should be able to purchase the item you want.
Re the second point, if you want the rare items and that involves gambling random item opaque loot boxes, that's an abusive relationship. If it involves purchasing the item directly, or buying a box where you can see all the items inside of it, that's a respectful relationship. Purchasing the item directly is the most preferred.
Games that do this entire model badly involve Hearthstone and any number of mobile games made by Supercell.
Some people might balk at the idea of purchasing any further items, but personally, I don't see anything particularly wrong with allowing cosmetics to be purchased and applied as a model that enables people to have a great free experience.
Fortnite's a good example about how your two rules aren't enough, actually. Because of the way the game's designed, it pressures its audience (of primarily children) into purchasing microtransactions, to the point where there's been widespread bulling of kids who don't pay for premium Fortnite skins [1].
For a more detailed exploration of the dark side of Fortnite's monetization model, check out "Manufactured Discontent and Fortnite" [2].
Children are going through the entire evolution of a society in the course of a few short years, when they're young and don't have a lot of perspective yet. They've always been jerks to each other. Fortnite didn't start that, and it's extremely unlikely that it has had any effect on it at all.
If not that, they'd bully each other about something else. When I was growing up, us kids who played Battletech and had a Nintendo were cool, and the Robotech kids with their Segas were the jerks (of course they'd say the opposite). Kids who weren't into games would pick on each other over other stuff, like having a generic notebook instead of a Trapper Keeper with a cool design.
The idea that Fortnite is pressuring kids to be mean to each other is just as overblown as all the other "think of the children!" claims. From "Rock n Roll is the devil's music!" to the Satanic Panic over Dungeons and Dragons and beyond. People will always claim that something is making the kids bad, but no, that's just how kids are. Old people have just forgotten what kids are like.
You can also find plenty of anecdotes of kids helping each other out in team mode, or building creative mode areas in games where they can cooperate and have fun, giving an escape and some camaraderie to other kids who don't normally have that in their lives.
Mm, no. Fortnite makes money by selling good to children. They make more money if they create an environment which stigmatizes not spending money, which is a tactic to which children are especially vulnerable and which necessarily leads to a group of children being stigmatized against by their peers. It's hardly "think of the children" to take issue with a business model which is demonstrably harmful.
Also, "children will bully each other no matter what" is not a rational response to something which exacerbates bullying. That's like saying "accidents happen no matter what, this is no worse than normal" with respect to a defective car with broken airbags.
One interesting thing I've heard when working for a company that had microtransaction mechanics is, "Non paying players create content". By engaging in the community, even if in isolation they cost the devs money to host, they create the content and also the audience for the whale's behaviour.
I think a lot of us have a vision of a childlike, halcyon "purity" of experience, in the joy of gameplay itself, that we would seek and enjoy with or without other people's presence, with or without money. We want to experience that, we also as programmers (who may have learned to code because we like games) often have a deep desire to create that, to give it to others. It's like the "Beatific Vision" in the life of one who likes games.
We all know there always was a need for money, and passionate creativity exists in its margin. I think the complaint here really is that this margin seems to have less room in the eyes of the complainers, because the pull for money is present in virtually every game loop now, as opposed to being outside of the box...
A question I want to ask is, for newest generation of whales, is there a memory of some great, memorable exploratory rush in the big spend for them, part of a broader set of social interactions that gave them great joy and built them up in their community? Would their experience with the game due to this purchased power inspire them in any way, maybe to make some potentially positive, impactful life decisions? Or is it literally just a borderline scam at every single possible level?
I dislike microtransactions of any kind strongly, but I am at least trying here to be open to the possibility that someone who did them was able to feel something similar in relationship to them somehow.
I guess I’m not quite a whale but for a brief period of time I was spending several hundred dollars a week to run contests and pay for ships and game time for an Eve: Echoes (the mobile version, although I did play the original) corporation. We had 100+ people playing, I was their fearless leader, we had a war at one point, lots of fun. I knew once I stopped all the spending a lot of people would just leave and I wanted the party to keep going for a little while longer. I bought an iPad Pro so it’d be easier for me to administer my corporation. It was during COVID and it made me feel important and felt like I had friends. I couldn’t keep it up though, and maybe 75 people evaporated to wherever they came from.
We ended up with about 25 people sticking around, people idolized me and it was fun for awhile. Eventually (after a few months) I got bored and gave the reins over to a much less “fearless leader founder” person and much more “I am an accountant irl and Eve sounds neat” type person, which worked out pretty well, and the corporation thrived. I think back fondly to that and felt like it was worth it.
Alternatively, maybe ten years ago I spent a similar amount of money on this mobile game that was like sim city and Pokémon and time lapse command and conquer all rolled into one. I hate that I played that and hate how they managed to get my addiction loop just right and I was spending most of my paycheck on this stupid game. I had a guild and “friends” there too but it just felt like we were a bunch of addicts justifying each other’s spending habits. We knew what the in app purchase limits were for apple and how to get around them and stuff that just seems insane to me now.
"N-gon is a physics-based single player 2-d platformer shooter with hundreds of different power ups. You move with the keyboard and aim with the mouse. The core game is done, but I'm still adding new content.
You can play here for free. It's open source, no ads, no tracking, no data harvesting, no crypto-mining, no DLCs, no freemium, no microtransactions, no gacha."
They raise an interesting point I've wondered about, in regards to movies:
> "Like you are watching Avengers End game in Netflix and they ask you if you wanna pay 5 dollars more to watch Captain America use his well known outfit instead of regular clothes?"
While that example is unlikely, we may in the future see paid narrative arcs. The base movie might be free, taking you to a certain point in story where you're presented a fork in road. One path is free with low budget action, the other paid and contains more action, more sex and big budget scenes!
Maybe some use case for NFTs after all. Link the stuff you can get through playing a game or buy ingame for cash to a NFT and boom, players really own that stuff and are free to sell it on the secondary market.
You're describing Diablo 3's famously unpopular and disastrous auction house. Adding resale would just make everything worse — especially if you rope NFTs into it for no reason.
On other hand Valve's model doesn't seem too hated. And I got my Steam Deck out of it. I much prefer some chance to get money I invested back, even as only store credit.
Thankfully there are games like the Soulsbourne series! I found Japanese studios are the better ones nowadays for 'genuine' games based on a one-time sale. GTA V is releasing a $5.99 subscription service that basically lets you buy micro transactions at a discount.
It's a great business model for multiplayer games. They live and die on the basis of network effects, and gating access behind a $25-60 upfront payment means most games die from gradual attrition - which is just sad to watch happen when it's an enjoyable but niche game. Subscriptions are dead, with even Blizzard struggling to make it work, and most DLC models just don't work for multiplayer.
Looking at my Steam library, I only regret the $60 AAA titles I've bought and never found interesting enough to play beyond a few hours. $60 for 15 hours of gameplay, or an optional $100 after 150 (or 1500) hours? I know which I prefer.
I vastly prefer the freemium model because of this. It's great compared to before when we had sequels, expansion packs or even map packs that was the only way to get new content. But that new content wasn't available to people who didn't buy it, so now the playerbase will be split each time new content is released.
To expand, DLC models for multiplayer either split the community (only people who purchased the DLC can join this lobby) or they inevitably make the game pay-to-win. If I'm going to get shot by a $20 sniper rifle, I'd rather it have the same stats as the one I have access to.
I will say it sucks when the cosmetic item you want is only available via lootbox, but at least for Counter-Strike Global Offensive (another Valve title) you can buy either boxes or the exact item you want. I think Valve is pretty far from the worst offender here.
I don’t play fortnite and have no interest in it. But this always sounded weird to me. If it’s so extreme to be seen as F2P… can’t you just buy a single cosmetic outfit and call it a day? There’s no way people are keeping track of whether you rotate your wardrobe or care if you happen to like a random skin, right?
I'm a whale and I don't feel exploited. I don't like gambling but I like buying chests. People spending money on trips or cars, things I have no interest in, are also exploited in that case.
No, in most games I know what I'm getting so there's no randomness. I buy a chest of 1000 gems in order to buy X in game. How is that gambling? Sure, some games force the randomness on me through chests with unknown content but that's not what I'm paying for.
I'm always the wrong guy to ask as a customer what business model to use to make money, but I remember reading some Call of Duty required people to buy maps or else you couldn't join multiplayer servers with them. There was a lot of predictable complaining that there weren't many players on the servers using the new maps. It honestly sounded exhausting to keep track of as a player to me and like it would server to repeatedly split the player base until the population died out.
I'm not a console user, but ran into this when Modern Warfare 2 brought it to the PC (I think. If not MW2, then one of the early Black Ops titles). I was too young to have my own way to purchase them, but never felt the motivation to pay up, so I'd just get auto-kicked by the system if a lobby started with a map I didn't have access to.
I haven't played Call of Duty in a long time, but when I heard that Modern Warfare Remastered would have some maps locked behind a DLC[0] (along with the rest of the shitshow surrounding its release), I knew that I'd probably never buy another one of those titles again. I think the last I bought was MW2 or BO2.
On PC, in Modern Warfare 1, the maps were made available for free, while they cost extra for consoles. Modern Warfare Remastered 'conveniently' left them out of the base game, but charged a higher-than-original price for the pack, for all platforms. Consider that a remaster is generally supposed to contain all content (i.e. game + DLC), and this was a slap in the face to my younger self.
I mostly don't really mind, there is just so many games out there these days, and so many ways to play lots and lots of games for very little money. Mostly the extras are not pay to win, but there are a number that are pay to fast forward. Some are pay to fast forward and no reasonable way to earn the thing in a game in a reasonable time, those ones are a bit evil (GT7 being the latest version of that ). Overall though, for far less $s than in the past, you can play a heck of a lot games if you don't get sucked into paying for loot boxes / upgrades / cosmetics.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 318 ms ] threadwhat horse-shit, let's see the numbers.
my personal take : freemium exists because the video game industry figured out to exploit the gambling bugs in the human psyche to leverage them to gain even further profit.
If piracy killed gaming so badly, how are the market numbers represented from now (when piracy is rampant and distribution is easy) from then (let's say the 80s or early 90s when distribution was near impossible and DRM wasn't needed as physical copying was prohibitive enough?)
Gee, a quick search shows me that the video game industry is bigger than it ever has been, and the growth hasn't ever plateau'd. In fact, if the industry was in danger from piracy destroying all revenue it'd be easy to show me the dip where freemium tactics began to help the recovery -- can you point that dip out to me?
I haven't been able to find that dip.
Hypothesis : the adoption of freemium tactics had nothing to do with loss-of-sales revenue and everything to do with increasing profits.
Piracy has existed as long as games have and continues to this day, and yet FOR SOME REASON, gaming (not the casino kind) is the most profitable entertainment industry in the world at this time.
Want to know the truth? Only poor people pirate (just like any criminal, you usually have to be poor to be motivated to be a bad actor), so the vast majority are not actually lost sales. As soon as game lovers get some cash, they throw down to get the games they want.
And not only poor people pirate, or commit any crime in general. It works in reverse. Activities by poor people, that rich people don't appreciate, is what our society labels 'crime'. When rich people commit unwanted activities, it is called 'privilege'. There is a reason poor people are incarcerated in prisons, whereas rich people are fined for their transgressions. I have yet to hear of more than a single person (a swiss guy) going to jail for what transpired in 2007 and 2008. If anybody got in prison for that in 2008, it was the victims. I too hate what modern games have become. And I hate that I used to be able to buy movies as perpetual DVDs, but that big business privilege in the intervening 20 years have changed the laws into "you have a right to RENT movies from us".
For the same reason that people wear nice clothes in real life, why are you surprised that some people want to look cool in a video game? Are you surprised that people don’t just wear monochrome black shirts in real life? Likewise, you can resell RL items, there’s a market for that. Are you surprised when you can’t resell a shirt you wore for a year at the same price as when you bought it?
That’s not to say that games where progression is locked behind time gates where you need to buy 1000 Realm Warp Crystals or whatever just to actually play the game aren’t a toxic hell. But that doesn’t seem to be what the article is pushing against.
The standard multi ranked map sometimes feels boring and I've wondered why they don't add different types of maps to the mix; spheres, tubes, different physics, goals in the center, figure 8 map(?), embankments (like map in season 1), etc.
I guess it's simple and works but it'd be cool to see new gameplay related updates.
The complication when it comes to adding new features is that Rocket League is built on top of a bespoke scripting engine that was discontinued after Unreal Engine 3, so they have to fully recreate RL in UE5. Because of this they don't want to put any additional resources into new features for UE3 since it's wasted effort once the game transitions to the new engine.
I did like that game mode where the ball would gravitate towards the goal!
The only genuinely new one they've done for years was the NFL mode, which they presumably got paid for and wasn't very good.
I mean, how or why would they? You release something; it makes 90% of its lifetime revenue in year 1; if you continue working on it for 6 more years, you're out of business.
As for the ownership or survivability of in-game virtual goods -- I think the author is referring to Valve's hats in Team Fortress 2? -- to me it's nonsensical to complain that you don't own it outside of the game. It only has relevance in the game, and it would be silly to ask the company to develop some external service just for owning your object. The ones that have tried that kind of thing just fail and look silly. But wait! Along come NFTs, with potential permanent ownership... but gamers despise that idea, too.
Gamers are just eternally grumpy and conservative about changes and progress. (I say that as a grumpy gamer, myself.)
Now: Pay for game prior to its release, launch day, people will tell you the bugs are actually features, studio milks franchise forever.
Yep, nothing to see here, no regular, ongoing support to a 20 year old game of the non-subscription variety at all. Warcraft 3 (from 2003) was similarly updated well into 2019.
Now, most regular games only get 2 or 3 years of attention.
> Along come NFTs, with potential permanent ownership... but gamers despise that idea, too.
Oh no, how dare we despise things that anyone can see will not work as advertised.
Similarly Warcraft 3 had a 5 year gap between 1.26b in 2011 and 1.27a in 2016, which was probably about when they started development for Reforged, announced in 2018.
Minecraft still gets significant updates.
> I mean, how or why would they? You release something; it makes 90% of its lifetime revenue in year 1; if you continue working on it for 6 more years, you're out of business.
I think a lot of these companies have found that it's the opposite—that games make 90% of their revenue in year 1 because nobody continues working on them. If you keep working on it, however, you can continue to get sales, because the more you work on it, the better the game becomes, and so people buy it just to see what everyone else is talking about.
Permanent ownership of what? If the game servers shut down or you get banned[1] for some reason your permanent ownership is meaningless. Also how are NFTs different than the existing systems like the Steam marketplace in terms of functionality?
[1] Oh yeah, NFTs require you to have an online account for the game. I would argue my unlocks in SSBM are much more permanent than any game NFT because there's no account for Nintendo to ban that could cause me to lose access to them.
Personally I view games as art that's closer to food than a painting: ephemeral, may disappear after being consumed.
Plenty of games get regular patches and updates (Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition being one I recently played) and back in the day, games would release paid expansions. No reason that Rocket League couldn't sell a map pack, for example. Sure, its a similar idea as freemium (pay for more content), but at least the expansions used to be sizable packs with lots of content. Old school expansions, as well as expansions like those of The Witcher 3 or the FROM Software games (which are often lauded as better than the base game), that cost about 1/4 the price of the base game for a decent content boost extend the life of the game, provide the developer with continued income and feel a lot less scammy than fremium games do.
Ubisoft has announced NFT integration via their own platform. However, unlike an actual "I can do what I want with this" token, it may as well be a database entry in the company network: https://quartz.ubisoft.com/welcome/
I don't think there's any way to 'solve' NFTs in games right now: A true NFT can be moved anywhere on an open network (monkey jpeg receipts, etc), but a game-related NFT needs to be constrained to those users who play the game, otherwise it's even more useless.
It doesn't help that most things NFT-related are scams, hype bait, etc.
Agree totally. NFTs for games make quite literally no sense. You are buying an asset or whatever from a central authority (the developer/publisher) that only exists or makes any sense within their game/platform/ecosystem. What value could a token bring there? The only value add I could see is that your ability to buy and sell the asset is now out of the hands of the publisher... except it isn't since they still control access to the asset and can therefor constrain your use of it in any way they see fit.
This is really a problem with most of the NFT related ideas floating around. Once a central authority is involved your token ceases being meaningful and just becomes, like you said, an ID in a database somewhere.
They can create digital scarcity of in-game items using a centralised server. Any NFT linked to an in-game item will be just as worthless when the servers are eventually shut down. And they don't want players buying and selling items, they want to take a cut every time a player buys something.
You're never going to be taking your Fortnite skins into FIFA or your Gran Turismo cars into Mario Kart. Ain't going to happen for a multitude of reasons.
(And if one publisher/developer does something like that as a gimmick, allow importing items into a specific another game, they could do that with a centralised database too)
There's a lot of games that have a sort of boring standard (SC2's 1v1 ladder maps are all same-y, nobody competitive plays Smash with items on, etc.) and the fact that you see this pop up repeatedly in unrelated communities should probably tell you something.
IMO, when you have a game with sufficiently deep mechanics, wackiness tends to obscure that depth, resulting in an experience that's less interesting rather than more. Like if you added Mario Kart abilities to football/soccer and suddenly the winning team was getting regularly blue shelled, I don't think it would improve the experience, even if initially it'd be hilarious.
Now maybe it's still worth it to have "party game" modes in some cases, I'm just saying that these modes might not have legs, so to speak, and thus may not be worth the dev effort if hardly anyone plays them.
Anyway that's why I also used SC2 as an example. Blizzard's attempts to add more wackiness/variety to the 1v1 ladder maps have generally been poorly received.
Now, SC2's co-op mode has a bunch of wackiness and did great, but note that this is very VERY separate from standard ladder/melee games. It's not just "oh we changed a few rules" or "we took the base game and added wacky items" it's a much more fundamental rework than that, it's an entirely new 'vertical' for the game. And yeah, that kind of thing could probably work for a game like Rocket League.
If your primary audience is casual, like in the case of Nintendo games, then it makes all the sense in the world.
Obviously you could argue that Psyonix ought to be appealing to a casual audience. That's a separate conversation, and I'd argue that RL is a fundamentally bad fit for that sort of game, but given what they have been going for thus far, not introducing crazier modes makes a lot of sense.
They do that pretty regularly. Not in major ways, but the rules of football do change over time.
I personally am glad the developers have realized they have a game like this and haven’t killed their game through adding more for the sake of more.
They tried. Wasteland, Neo Tokyo, and Starbase ARC were non-standard maps. Players complained about it, and now they are changed to be standard.
They still keep adding other game modes some of which are only there for a few days.
They tried that with the original wasteland map and there was huge pushback from the community and people demanded the maps be standardized.
simply because it actually pays to play. I've made about $20 bucks this month from just selling cases given out randomly at the end of each match. It cost me nothing to buy yet the in game items (cosmetic skins that don't influence gameplay) regularly sell for good money.
it also make sense to buy the keys to unlock the cases sometimes simply because you might unlock a skin that fetches far more money. so it is a bit like gambling in that aspect.
i'm just constantly amazed how they were able to pull the economics behind this. clearly the ppl who expect a 10~100x ROI on their keys must outnumber those selling the cases. I mean I can imagine a bunch of people just farming cases day and night. Perhaps even a sophisticated AI could pull it off since the in game drops aren't even correlated with your performance.
even more impressive is how this is all legal since it really is gambling of sorts.
> ... so it is a bit like gambling ...
I hate what video games have become.
again this doesn't impact the gameplay at all and I'm happy to earn some money. was able to buy another title on steam with the money accrued
That doesn't mean it isn't fun to do so, although there's a very high chance you'll come to regret the number of hours pumped into such games and the way they kept you engaged in their dopamine loop.
I think this is more than anything, an app store sickness.
It has spread a little to consoles and desktop, but I can still buy a 100% offline, single player game, which has the main purpose of entertaining me.
It has a story, a point to it, a mystery often, fun things to do which aren't mining or grinding away.
I pay 80 bucks for the privilege, and am quite happy to do so. It is worth it, giving me many hours of entertainment.
Some boast "oh I finished the game first run through in 8 hours" Really? Such players just ignore all the scenery, don't really explore, don't grasp the full mystery, just... fast fast! Gotta get this over with!
I play and take in the scenery, and games like the Last of Us, Horizon Zero Dawn are fun, take 50 to 100 hours to play this way.
Just reading things in-games, clues, discovering how these worlds got this way was 1/2 the fun of the game!
So stop playing on your portable addiction device. Its hold is more devious too, as it is always in your pocket.
Your PC, console, are with you on the bus. At work. In the kitchen.
Return to us, good sir. Return to real gaming.
it just so happens that I seem to get good cases that I was able to sell for a bit of change but it is not like you can play 20 hours every week and make consistent money.
It's not a bit like gambling, it's exactly gambling and the predatory nature of it is what I hate about video games.
people bet on soccer too but that shouldn't stop you from getting excitement from it.
In my home country (Belgium) and my neigboring country (Netherlands) a lot of games their lootboxes are not available for us for the reason that the game-creators do not advertise the dropchances like the lottery, casino's and other gambling games are forced to do.
The reasoning is that the items that come out of the lootbox have a monetary value (as you need to pay to unlock a lootbox) so they fall under some of our gambling laws.
In my eyes, good riddance and I hope more countries will follow.
So Valve, EA Games,... just disabled opening lootboxes for us as they seem to be afraid to advertise the "drop chances" (but we can still buy and sell them)
With CSGO third parties were essentially selling games for actual currency instead of credit with Valve and using skins as currency for gambling on esports matches. A few of them also came up with other gambling games that didn't even involve esports.
It was also a great vehicle for money laundering: https://www.theguardian.com/games/2019/oct/30/counter-strike...
Wild times.
No, because the market for second-hand clothing is extremely oversaturated and clothing, particularly "fast fashion", simply does not last long enough to live a useful second life any more.
A video game skin however does not degrade, it will look the very same (or better) even in two decades.
No and thats why its silly to say rocket league items have no impact on gameplay, ofcourse its nicer play with hot wheels car that has animated decals than grey corolla.
I would like game to be more like "if you get this good, you get these cool items" instead of something like "if we put paid rewards right next to free rewards, then 15% of our playerbase is going to buy paid tier." :/
I had no problem with dlc cars, it felt like I was supporting the game, now it feels like I'm being manipulated to give money to somebody who owns rocket league.
Epic Games. Why are we surprised by this when they saw a cash cow when they bought it, and have done nothing but turn it into another Fortnite?
I think this type of game needs its own genre. Fortnite, RL, GTA Online, Warzone... They all follow the same model of "build a good multiplayer experience and "support it" perpetually by squeezing as much revenue as you can from your users".
I was a huge RL fan in 2015/16. It started going down hill sometime after that and EG has run it into the ground.
It's a viable business model and it allows players to enjoy the game for many years to come. What bothers me a little is that these revenue extracting schemes are usually very complicated and are probably complicated because it allows them to extract as much money as possible from a small subset of players. Like casino's and mobile games.
The game exists as a monetization engine. Some amount of fresh content is required to keep feeding the machine, but the goal is generally to let the machine run while dropping in bits of content and purchasable junk for the players to consume.
that's called "live service". In theory. A lot of games try to skip the "build a game that's actually fun and reasonably complete" part and just race to dump it on the market as soon as it's barely (or not even) playable and think they'll add content later. That's not live service, that's early access, and it's killed BFV and then BF2042 after it, Anthem, etc. EA is very very bad about this.
But yeah, when you hear a publisher say that a game is going to be a "live service", that's what it means, they want to do the fortnite model and squeeze ongoing revenue from the player base by whatever means. Sometimes it's cosmetic-only, sometimes it's not (R6: Siege), sometimes it starts one way and then becomes gameplay-affecting 6 months or 12 months down the road when they've got a player base who's attached to the game.
Of course, just like changing the game to add P2W elements after the fact, sometimes they won't. Valve basically abandoned TF2 about 5 years ago, they are still raking in money from it (it's still a top-10 game on steam...) but they won't even keep up with anti-cheat let alone continue development. Or even continue live service. No live service, only pay. And nor will they even allow the community to fix the game on their own, like Team Comtress 2...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnBDMZ-9-Dw
It isn't like not being a live service game killed Quake 3, for example.
Obviously that would be a problem on the PC but games would remain popular and publishers would get paid without either of those things. Games as a whole wouldn't go anywhere. They just make more money this way.
Yes, obviously a big part of it is that every studio is hoping for their game to become the next WoW or Fortnite or Destiny— a franchise that will print money for a decade with not much more investment than a few content drops a year.
But I think the expectations of players have changed too, as far as matchmaking, leaderboards, progression, anti-cheat, anti-abuse, etc. You just can't deliver these things in a consistent way with the distributed client-server model, and companies needed to own the end-to-end experience vs farming out the community management side to faceless volunteer guild/clan/server operators.
> It isn't like not being a live service game killed Quake 3, for example.
Dead to who? It still has players, but it's "financially" dead, which is what the studio cares about when making these choices.
Keep in mind again that this is about the game surviving not about squeezing all the money possible out of their playerbase - after all the topic was about hating what video games have become.
The main reason I still play is to continue improving, and I don't think I could ever do that effectively if I was limited to only playing against people in my local sphere. My rank typically puts me somewhere in the top 1% of players (and honestly, I'm not even that good. The skill ceiling is insanely high), online match making may be frustrating sometimes but it's the easiest way to find opponents who will push those boundaries.
Would a hosted server work well for people who are much lower ranks who are primarily playing to just mess around with friends? Probably. I would quit tomorrow if online matchmaking went away though.
There are many different attempts at business models in games. Splitgate started with your suggestion and has since gone free to play. Numerous MMOs have tried subscriptions and have gone free to play. It's a sad state of affairs, but for every successful Minecraft, Stardew, or Valheim, there's thousands of failed attempts.
The point I'm trying to make is that these things have been tried by one game or another, and there's good reasons why the "run your own server" model died for the most popular games. Ignoring that is, I think, discarding a lot of historical evidence and nuance against blanket "why don't they just do X" arguments.
If there's a better way, it won't be a return to the past. It will be something new that no one has thought of yet.
> The items that you buy have absolutely no impact on gameplay and are just visuals
Cosmetic items are not just visual though. They are real elements in the game. Cosmetic items are interactive. They are unlockable, collectable, wearable items.
Further, visuals do impact the gameplay. You could argue about the difference between "gameplay" and "visuals" but each supports/influences the other and both are critical elements of almost every videogame. However you divide up the parts of a game, they all affect each other. Generally speaking, having all of the elements working together makes for a better game.
Monetisation strategies like microtransactions, loot boxes, etc. are also part of the game. However, the goal of such parts is not aligned with that of the others. The game is compromised by the introduction of the monetisation strategies.
> why are you surprised that some people want to look cool in a video game?
Nobody is surprised by this.
Yes, I really hate this argument that cosmetics are not gameplay. Visuals are a huge part of what makes a game, no one would be happy if games shipped without textures and shaders and people would have to pay to unlock them.
It seems to me that it definitely has a psychological impact for some folks (myself included) in both off-line and on-line competition.
The real problem is that loot boxes are gambling, and are addictive, period. It triggers something in otherwise rational people, especially children, that makes it feel good to spend money on mostly non-gameplay-altering cosmetics.
As a medic in team fortress 2, I usually pocket and ubercharge the players with cosmetics. It's an important team resource, and the odds of someone with a "default" skin making good use of it are fairly low. Much like plumage for a bird it's a reliable signal of "virility" - if you're invested enough in the game to own a $200 hat and a coordinated outfit then you've probably played it long enough for me to trust you sight-unseen.
http://i49.photobucket.com/albums/f278/katietiedrich/comic26...
If you're a pro player with the default skin, you're gonna have a bad fucking time, because you're last priority for heals, you're not getting an ubercharge, etc. That is gameplay-affecting even if the cosmetic itself is not.
And of course it's a vanity component (at least for me, though other posters have raised other factors). Everyone's different with different preferences and as long as there's not a problematic spending aspect I think it's fine...but this links back to the gambling issue. Personally I only buy cosmetics in a few games I play a lot and that don't use loot box mechanics.
OP is just ranting about people who pay more getting a better experience, making paying such a central part of gaming. They just hate this, which I agree with, although I know others don't.
In a way, getting a better experience just for being able and willing to pay more is a basic feature of our society. Why should we expect videogames, being as expensive and lucrative, to be radically different from the rest of society?
I'll just continue appreciating those games who are, those who actually work more like art. If I ever decide to try a F2P loot-box generator-style game, it generally puts me off quickly.
Because it determines whether free players can still compete with paying customers.
There's no problem with a paid weapon skin that just looks cool since everyone is still on a level playing field. If that paid skin gives the user double damage then you've created 2 classes of players and one of them is superior. In such cases, the only reason free players even exist is to serve as fodder for your paying customers. They're there to get wrecked.
Because unlike the real world, we expect games to be inherently fair and meritocratic. In a competitive game, we expect that no matter how somebody looks or what they may say, the only thing that matters is their ability to perform. This is comparable to why people get upset about, say, the speed-enhancing swimwear for the Olympic games but don't have any problem with that swimwear existing.
One of the central functions of games is to level the playing field, or at least to reduce the dimensionality to such a degree that it is possible to be focused on all influencing factors in a game within the confines of that game. A closed-system, when we're usually all stuck playing in an open-system. Since all real-world closed-systems actually exist within an open-system, of course there could be external influences, but gamers generally have an expectation that attempts will be made to make a game as self-contained and closed as is possible. Pay-to-win games break this contract to make those unwilling to pay into unwitting tools for the enjoyment of the paying customer. They are open-systems under the guise of being closed-systems.
Granted, the category referred to as "Games" now includes many different things, including "Experiences" that aren't really games at all. And there are so many games today that it's pretty easy to find games that are actually games at their core. But there's also plenty of games that are marketed as games but turn out to be significantly about art / fashion to such a degree that they can no longer really be classified as games.
I've got call out Roblox for playing the meta-game here in a way that all gamers frustrated by pay-to-win will appreciate. It takes the idea of a closed system being broken into an open system, and makes that (making F2P games) into a closed system that breaks into an open system: you get to pay-to-win at creating pay-to-win games. A beautiful pyramid scheme that even your 11-yo child can enjoy being exploited within!
If these had no “gameplay” effect or “competitive advantage” based on environment, why do nation states spend money developing them and equip troops differently based on biome?
And why have some games had to patch their PvP to “outline” opposing players with a visibility border in the patches that follow certain “cosmetics”?
A more subtle advantage can arise from hitboxes in both hitscan and projectile games with customizers or cosmetics that change the mesh. There’s a reason some games are predominantly female characters in close fit gear.
Finally, even games that insist no gameplay or competitive advantage, are fully aware of “the meta”.
In Fallout 76, for example, PvP players learned to hotkey the “Nuka-Cola” drinks with special benefits. In a for money store, Bethesda allows you to purchase a robot junk collector that gathers Nuka-Colas for free. Rationale is it is just a QoL (quality of life) benefit, but in reality, it allows stockpiling a combat advantage to last longer in combat than the opponent. Same store also allows you to purchase “repair kits” for weapons and “bubble gum” that suppresses the survival mechanism around eating/drinking for an hour of game play.
Again, Bethesda’s claim is QoL not pay-to-win, but weapons repairable mid-battle away from one’s base certainly affects winning, and level of hunger/thirst affects damage multipliers and action point refresh (aka ‘mana’).
Lines keep moving.
Not a meaningful comparison. A game without textures would be hardly playable at all. The same can't be said for skins or accessories to your character/vehicle. You don't get eye-cancer with the default skin. If you feel you need that virtual Louis Vuitton bag to fully enjoy the game then well be a sucker and pay for it and pretend the game was just a little more expensive. I've yet to encounter a game where I feel like I'm missing out on anything with the default player model/skin/car.
So where do we stop? This is just one more way, in addition to the thousands we already have, in which peer pressure and status symbols manifest.
I don't really muss with my car too much anymore, instead I just click "Equip Now" every time I can and slowly modify it over time.
It'd be fine. No textures doesn't mean everything is gray.
I don't disagree that they do add something, but theses ones are not something that I want, nor that I need.
> if games shipped without textures and shaders and people would have to pay to unlock them.
I do have to pay for the textures and shaders... I did pay for them as a matter of fact. I didn't pay for the one not included, as I didn't want them. Some did want them, and did pay for them individually. Just like I didn't pay for Elden Ring but plenty did...
Now, when you bought that game, if you were expecting a specific amount of content, and you didn't get that content without paying more, I agree completely, that would be false advertising and that would be definitely wrong.
False advertising is definitely an issue in video games, there's so much overpromising and under-delivering but IAP isn't the issue there (though it definitely can be the reason for your false advertising). Until that part is handled correctly, the market did alleviate most of the false advertising by having an abundant amount of reviews and to me that's a not so bad way to deal with this.
That of course assumes that the game isn't sold to me with these "better" visuals as included.
Back in the days we used mods and texture packs to remove (hardware) expensive textures from the game so we get more FPS. I'm not sure if your argument applies to all games. For many games there is a competitive scene that usually don't give a shit about visuals and would trade most visual features for more frames per second.
https://worldofwarships.com/en/news/sales-and-events/arpeggi...
[1] https://support.rocketleague.com/hc/en-us/articles/360029832...
see: Halo Infinite
Want to be black? that will be $10 please
This is an interesting point. I think it begs the question, what _is_ the goal of a game? 10 years ago I would have said that broadly, the goal of a video game is to create an experience the player will enjoy. Perhaps now it's more simple though, maybe the goal of the vast majority of games today is to create a model in which money is willingly transferred from the player to the publisher.
The reality is that commercial experience games - where the goal is trigger the imagination and guide the player to a rich experience - are much rarer than commercial extraction games, where the goal is to create addictive engagement and spending patterns which can be monetised.
This isn't nearly as true for tangible commercial board games, especially those that promote strategic and imaginative thinking. You can get started in chess with a chess board and a rule book. You do not have to keep spending money on nicer-looking pieces, and your board will not be monetised with pop-up ads. (Chess sites may be, but chess kept developing for hundreds of years without them.)
D&D and more obscure games like Carcassone are similar. You can spend extra on expansion packs, but even if you buy everything the expansion space is small and bounded. The physical costs of board game dev and distribution keep that true.
Electronic games have a virtually infinite potential expansion space, so the economics are drastically different. The temptation to turn every last thing into a monetisation engine is hard to avoid - to the extent that monetisation design has become a meta-game in its own right.
Yup, I think this gets lost in the "visual-only cosmetics are fine/gameplay-affecting is bad" position. The problem is that in most cases, even if the cosmetic is purely visual, games are now being designed around "how do we incorporate cosmetics" which is constraining the types of experiences that are being made and the mechanics they allow.
Battlefield 2042 is an example of a game that completely upended its traditional mechanics to pull in the concept of "operators" (like R6: Siege) because they knew they could make more money selling operators. And at some level that's gameplay affecting, maybe not the ideal picture of what happens when MTX gets involved, but that's always the temptation - "we'll make it gameplay-affecting, but it'll be fair". Once you bring money into the picture you are reliant on developers to take the high road - not just today, but for as long as the game is active/you're interested.
Its predecessor, BFV, was skin-based and it was still controversial not just that you had random Fortnite-style nazi characters running around the Pacific Theater or Japanese Rambo Lady running around Norway, but because they started to introduce tons of animations so that players could at least see the skins they paid $20 a pop for - and that is a basic game-design thing that affects everyone regardless of whether you yourself pay up or not.
At a more basic level, the single-player RPG is essentially dead because it's the most difficult to introduce MTX mechanics into those genre of games. And sure you can point to Elden Ring but even then they are using "cooperative" or "inter-session" mechanics that fundamentally exist as a way to get an "always-online" server system into the picture as a platform for MTX. You've got forced Denuvo on everything. Etc etc.
And again, even when it's done right, there is still an incentive to make the "free" mechanisms grindy so that players feel the urge to pay IRL money. LOTR: Shadow of War was an example of that where the game could technically be finished without MTX, but at a certain point the game ramped the difficulty so hard that it was virtually impossible, certainly impossible without suddenly turning the game into a second job. Many games similarly force hundreds of hours of grinding or... you can just pay and go play with your friends! You can get bait-and-switched once you are into the game and emotionally attached - and that can even occur after release/after reviews have been written, or even just so far into the game that most reviewers don't reach it in their 5 hours of gameplay on their pre-release copy.
Those MTX mechanism are still shaping gameplay mechanics even if they are "purely cosmetic" - and in many cases they are not, they are definitely gameplay-affecting by design (in major AAA/e-sports titles even, this isn't just random mobile crapware, R6:Siege is one of the most popular e-sports titles, LOTR is a mega-IP, etc). Games being designed around "how do we pump the player for cash most efficiently and with the least ability for them to hack around us" is itself a problem either way though, that's a corrosive mindset for game design as a whole that is enabled and encouraged by allowing MTX at all. Either you keep that camel out nose and all, or as soon as that nose is under the tent it's always going to be an insidious urge, and in many cases an explicit mandate from publishers to the studio.
Also, yes, in anything where you interact with another player, your interactions are shaped by the other player's responses to you, which is determined by your cosmetics. I posted this deeper in the thread but to...
If I were on an actual team of people, I'd expect cosmetics to only matter for at-a-glance identification of a specific player.
Most games you will play with 23 other randoms who you will never see again after a couple hours. And that is actually the problem - on an actual competitive team your entire team would be decent and everyone would be there to play seriously and get stuff done. But in public games you need some kind of fitness signal to figure out which players are going to be a waste of a team's scarcest resource. How do you tell that from a bunch of players jumping around a spawn room like monkeys for a minute during the setup countdown? Cosmetics. Plumage.
(and actually Valve have gone out of their way over the years to remove other potential signals, like sprays and chat...)
Plumage evolved in nature for a reason, it's still functional and important even though it's "cosmetic-only". Games are a social phenomenon and plumage is still important to them too and that still affects your gameplay too.
I usually play Deep Rock Galactic, which has some non-cosmetic ways to judge people's experience. Promotion(like prestige) of a class is indicated by a border color and number of stars, and indicates someone has played a character for promotion25 levels. Bronze stars are okay, silver stars should be decent.
'Blue Levels' are also present. They serve as an indicator of how many times that player has leveled up any* character. So, someone with blue level 100 and only one promotion star should still be considered experienced in terms of game sense, but not necessarily an expert on their character.
Someone with low 'blue levels' and no stars is just a greenbeard, and should not be expected to be great.
There is a similar player level mechanism in TF2 but not tied to classes at all, just a blue level type thing. That works in the starter room, but it's not a solution for the "I have two seconds to choose which of these players to uber before that soldier finishes bombing me"/"I need to pick one of these players to pocket to try and stay alive to keep the uber up for the team".
Plumage works, you can instantly make a call that this is a default player and that one has cosmetics, or recognize the cosmetics of a person who has played well previously/who you gave a chance and they did something antisocial/stupid. Trying to identify a player name, finding them on the scoreboard, and then re-syncing with what has happened in the game in the last 5 seconds just isn't practical.
Like, TF2 has been f2p for 10+ years now, random HNers aren't going to come up with the magic solution here, this is how the game plays regardless of whether you think it should be. It's not a problem, and it's actually one of the least-exploitative MTX mechanisms on the market, but you can't eliminate the effects of cosmetics on gameplay in many situations because plumage is such an important social cue.
https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:901463/FULLTEXT0...
Visual design is such a core aspect of (good) games to begin with, it's basically impossible to divorce that from the gameplay effects it has.
https://dc.uwm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3499&context=...
If you want an example of cosmetics that don't affect anything - Battlefield 1 has a fixed selection of guns and then each gun has some skins. Nobody else can really see the particular skin at range anyway so no real gameplay effect. This was done deliberately to allow the character design to be visually distinctive - a british medic runs around with crutches on their back for example, and the british scout wears a cape. Can't have that with cosmetics unless they're so trivial that nobody can tell they're there (BF1), or you go to great efforts to preserve character silhouettes (TF2). In BFV it's much much more difficult to tell the classes apart - any class can run around with a medic hat on for example! An elite skin can be any class - you have to visually identify what guns and items they're carrying, which is more challenging even if it's "just cosmetic" - a mere cosmetic gives you a tactical advantage, you know what your enemy is carrying and they have to guess about you.
And that's obviously because BFV was much more oriented around MTX sales, while BF1 focused on an "expansion pack" model.
So MTX clearly affects that aspect of game design even if it's "only cosmetic".
The holster is rare, and maybe you recognize that it's rare, but they could have just gotten it out of a drop and kept it. The Heavy with the funny flip-flops and sunglasses is probable more recognizable at-a-glance, but could have bought a bunch of cheap cosmetics for a few dollars on the market.
And in the case of keeping an uber ready, won't you have to stay pocketed long enough to learn if someone is a good or less-good choice? Even if it's raining hell on your position, you'd have a rough view of the Heavy and a kill feed that highlights the assists you're getting from them. What more is there to look for?
As for the Battlefield games you mention, my biggest issue in 5 was that all of the player models seemed to blend into the background. Most of the time, I wasn't able to spend brainpower trying to figure out who is which type of class, simply because I was too busy trying to figure out if some dull, misshapen blob was part of the map or trying to kill me. Combined with the general feel of the game (poor, imo), I was never motivated to spend enough time on it to get into anything serious. Haven't bought another Battlefield game since, and BF5 was on a steep sale at the time.
What? Co-op/PvP has been a major part of From Software's souls games going back to Demon's Souls in 2009. They can also be played entirely offline if you wish and have zero microtransactions or Denuvo.
Have you ever heard of thing called fashion souls? A lot of times I wear armour (pick and choose pieces) because it looks cool not because it have bigger numbers.
Not only that, sometimes they can affect the basic mechanics too. For example, some guns in Destiny 2 the range is measured from the end of the weapon model, and some skins extend the model out so the gun is further from the player. This in a one v. one scenario can give you a slight edge on one shot kill distance if you have the skin, so you can shoot earlier than an opponent without it.
the more regularly occuring thing is probably that parent's don't properly set up their kids phones and then they buy a few hundred or worse thousands bucks of something they shouldn't. but again those occurances are rare and don't cause really cause any actual damage, especially since you can get refunds for this stuff if it gets expensive very easily. kids regularly do stuff a lot more expensive than that. in fact kids themselves are a lot more expensive than that as a baseline.
the supposed exploitation of things like loot boxes has literally zero evidence behind it. all you will find are a few genuinely bottom of the barrel studies (as in that australian government study from some years ago, should literally be taken as an example in a book of how not to run a study).
and the constant comparison to gambling is really tiresome, because it's obviously not the same. people play themselves out of all their belongigs regularly with actual gambling, because their goal is to make a profit with gambling and their last gamble will surely turn it around. such a thing isn't possible even in the few online gaming markets remaining where you can resell your items for real money because its a big hazzle to liquidize all your assets.
Also, games are supposed to be a form of escapism, where the gameplay matters, not who you are and how much money your parents make.
You can argue in favor of the game itself being free allowing people to save 10 or 20 bucks. But gameplaywise Microtransactions inevitably make the gameplay experience worse, without exceptions.
Nothing that can be purchased in the game affects gameplay, it's all just cosmetics.
I have bought some items, but only by trading free drops for keys/credits.
As far as I know all custom cars have the same hitbox as one of the freely available cars.
The biggest issue I have with free to play is there's virtually no barrier for smurf accounts.
Paying for items that impact the game balance turns them into spending competitions: whoever pays the company the most money wins. Games designed like this are not even worth playing. I fell for one of these money sinks once, never again.
The complaint isn't about depreciation but rather the inability sell the items at all.
IMO the big change is to do with the lifecycle of games. Previously you release a new title, maybe a few DLCs, and then you move on. The game is done, you have to do something else, a sequel, a new IP, whatever. That was true for all games, multiplayer included. Now (for multiplayer) the idea is to try different releases until one sticks, and then try and make that game evergreen. The dream being something like League of Legends, which has been printing money for over a decade.
Whether that's a good or bad thing is up for debate I suppose.
Cosmetics are not nearly that resource intensive to produce, so its not about 'wearing nice clothes' a-la real life, where good materials are more expensive to produce. Attaching a price tag is PURELY for the benefit of the publisher.
Attaching real world costs to purchases in games also disproportionately targets neurodivergent and fiscally uneducated people. That seems like a fairly malicious business practice.
Microtransaction apologism is not a tractable stance, ever.
Why does attaching real world costs to purchases in-game strike you as “malicious” but not the real world cost of buying the game?
The first issue is that like I originally mentioned, microtransactions disproportionately affect neurodivergent individuals because of the addictive mechanics used to implement them. The concept of 'whales' is a term used to refer to big spenders in a game economy without fully examining the reason they are spending so much. For example, where you can only buy one copy of Elden Ring, you could easily buy a new copy of Forza every year and buy each car, which may be a compulsion if you have OCD, for example. The same argument could be (and should be) made against tiered subscription services in games. If there is a lootbox mechanic involved, the issue is only compounded further as it is an introduction of gambling mechanics. In some cases, it can be worth examining the presence of envy economics 'Oooh I want was they have! How much is it? Oh I want it more now I know!'.
The second issue is the scale difference is ridiculous. The amount of dev and artist time to produce a game sits at around 1.5 to 4 years and sometimes much more. There is a large number of artistic assets that are used in combination with code when making a game and those assets are paid for using the proceeds from the game sales. When micro transactions are produced, a fraction of those assets are divided out of the main game (or less often, added later) and can be produced on a 6 month cycle to be sold separately. To be explicit, the amount of assets made in a microtransaction is FAR less than those used to make the game, but often the price of the microtransaction does not reflect this (again, refer to Forza and the $200 car dlc for a minimum-$100 game). This means that either the publisher or the developer team (including art team) is receiving that margin, and if you think the developers are receiving a proportionate amount of that margin then I have some bad news for you.
To be clear, I think game monetisation is OK. But that does not mean all forms of monetisation are OK, and it definitely does not mean that diluting a product in a harmful way is OK.
Not to say that micro transactions are good practice or that they can’t be dealt with independently, but micro transactions are a very similar problem to real world cosmetics.
Sure you could argue that just having some correlation between true quality and perceived value is good enough, but I’d argue that charging for more visually appealing and better designed models ALSO is not zero correlation.
It's pretty much always the result of a broken redirect / history api usage. You go back to the page which redirected causing it to redirect again.
Then I go back to writing system software.
Regardless, when a great piece of software that happens to have a price tag fails to sell, whose fault is that?
Don't blame developers/publishers for going instead to the only model that pays the bills these days.
The market has pretty clearly spoken and decided that people prefer cosmetic micro transactions with free to play games. Just because it doesn’t match the Hacker News gaming utopia template doesn’t mean anyone is doing anything wrong.
This is especially true for multiplayer games where a lot of children don’t have money to buy the game but their presence on the platform adds value to the people who do have money to spend on it.
You could be right though, and it is addiction. That would in fact be uncool.
My only data-point though is a friend of mine who has spent hundreds of dollars (or more?) on Star Citizen ships and he is the disposable-income kind of gamer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S-DGTBZU14
All that the market discovered is that there is a huge number of "whales" that can be exploited. The "fun" will begin once the whales have squandered their money and will either leave entirely or, and that's the scenario I fear, some (or someone's relatives) will raise a sob story in front of their local newspaper or politician... ending in a repeat of the early 2000s with videogames being blamed as a whole for the excesses of a few, and religious and other moral fundamentalists getting ahead.
Markets are powered by billions of instances of “what someone wants” but that doesn’t mean the resulting market movements are always a good indicator of what everyone wants as an environment. Sometimes aggregate human activity results in a crappy experience for most participants. “The market has spoken” is a glib, ideological phrase that can be used to dismiss any discussion about ways we could steer and improve markets to make them do a better job at facilitating human happiness and flourishing.
My critique, pushing as much of the blame onto the gamers, was meant to point out that everyone/no one is to blame.
Playing a competitive FPS game casually with all age groups is lot of more fun and attractive to most gamers a la Apex/Warzone/Fortnite/Valorant/CSGO.
By charging up front you remove an enormous player base and create a worse matchmaking experience for all players. Long gone are the days of buy a Call of Duty game for Christmas.
I wonder how many people on HN complaining about this model actually even consider themselves gamers.
I'm a gamer. I spend 30-40 hours/week on PC games. I think the "Free-to-play with paid cosmetics" (Apex Legends, Rocket League, Splitgate, tons of other games that follow this model) is perfectly fine.
I think part of the problem is that it's hard to have a conversation about this model because someone will always make references to games that are pay-to-win (Most mobile games) or gate content behind a paywall (Not sure which games do this today), which are an entirely different beast and not a part of the conversation.
EDIT: Just remembered League of Legends. It gates content (characters to play) behind progression, or you can pay money to unlock them immediately. But paid characters aren't necessarily more powerful, and they're constantly making adjustments to characters to try to keep them balanced. Any experienced player will tell you that paying money for a character perceived as being overpowered is foolish as it's guaranteed they'll eventually get nerfed.
There are also plenty of games that implement a cometic lootboxes that don't impact gameplay model that are totally fine.
That being said I'll stand by artificial scarcity being bad thing and clarify that while I don't have some master plan on how to create a functioning society where we don't have to impose artificial scarcity on the digital world; I absolutely think that is something we should be dedicating a lot of effort to. I reject the premise that we need to deny some people things that can be copied essentially for free.
Again this just sounds like an emotional argument -- you seem convinced on a purely intuitive level that artificial scarcity is bad without actually explaining rationally how the harm it does outweighs the benefits.
There is a _very simple_ argument (which I'm not claiming is _true_ in all cases, but it is at least compelling, so anyone claiming the contrary needs to address it) in favor of artificial scarcity: taking away a major monetization strategy (often the only viable one) massively reduces the incentive to create high-quality products and we all end up poorer for those cultural outputs not existing.
Ahahaha, to be quite honest I don't find that argument compelling at all. Profit motives seem to be making software much much worse, not better, compared to what I know is possible. I'm often finding myself reverse engineering/hacking things just to make them usable. From where I'm standing the current system is not doing a very good job. I can often make notable usability improvements in the systems I interact with and IP laws, the main driver of digital artificial scarcity generally prevent me from sharing them. I feel like I'm constantly fighting hostile software that's just trying to extract value from me in some way rather than actually solving my problems.
The patronage "platform" would be the new Apple/Google and would likely be riddled with corruption
Sure, personal responsibility is important. In the end the only person who can free an addict from the quagmire of addiction is them. But that doesn't stop us from regulating the fuck out of tobacco companies, heroin dealers or casinos to reduce the harm they do to their victims.
The elephant in the room is that we as an industry hold the power to alter people's psychology on a greater scale than any drug. But people stay silent because it delivers the paychecks and the shareholder returns...
Most of the decent games have migrated there. I barely use it, but I think it works out to two bucks with the other iStuff I'm happy to pay for, and having a few games on my tablet or phone can be nice when I'm traveling.
AFAIK it costs $100 +30% to publish on Steam. It only takes 260 people to buy your game at 50 cents to break even. If your game can't sell 260 copies at 50 cents then it's just that, worthless.
Why not just release your game for free, for free? Does it have to be on Steam? Does it have to make money?
It doesn't take zero time to ship a bespoke finished game, your calculus is asinine.
Do you have to have a place to sleep?
Seems to me like making a reasonable amount of money to help towards these goals is not an unreasonable thing to hope for. But maybe you can prove me wrong?
Thanks for the clarification!
Also free health care, electricity, water, and Internet.
Your right about a good concept winning a lot of good will and making success possible with less polish, but these days it doesn’t subtract the “risk of never being discovered” if you make an iOS app your just one of millions in the App Store if it’s on steam the shovelware isn’t as bad and discovery is better but it still requires market understanding in order to stand out.
Discovering a game concept like that is hard, but it does happen.
I'm OK with those offering freemium and such so long as it doesn't kill off the old model. I don't think it will.
I find giving myself unlimited resources (e.g. with cheat codes in the old days or with credit cards today) greatly diminishes the experience. At that point, why even bother playing? There's other mediums of entertainment that makes colors splash on monitors.
“Like our content? Install our app so we can send you notifications and monetise you better!” - no, I’m not enjoying your content. I haven’t even read any of it yet. Your obnoxious pop up is the only content I’ve seen so far and it makes me want to pour water in your server rack. I’m not going to install your app.
The only two games I play these days both happen to be gacha games, and actually I see a lot less complaints about the toxicity of these luck-based systems in those communities. Maybe it's because they're more used to them, maybe it's because most other gacha games include pity systems, but it seems weird to me that the most vocal complaints are over systems with no bearing on gameplay when gacha games limit free access to new characters and, by extension, progress.
This opinion might vary by the person and the game. I was playing some free-to-play game the other day which was like you described - it had a store and some tokens, and a way to slowly gain the premium token as you played.
But I found there to be something deeply gross about it which did impact my gameplay experience. I’m playing a game (rather than doing something else) because I want a curated experience of fun. Tokens like this make the relationship adversarial. In this case, the game has some mechanics which it keeps waving in your face - “quick! Click now to spend 2 whatevers to have a 4 hour boost!” And I have to actively avoid the shiny fun part because it costs real money to do. It makes the experience tiring in the same way shopping is tiring. Is the game trying to be fun or not? Pick a lane.
That said, I enjoyed Dota2 for many years even though it had hat stores and loot boxes full of art. I’m not sure what the difference is - I think I just never really had to resist the pull to pull out my credit card in dota. And I payed way more as a result! I chipped in a few dollars each year for the international prize pool, and that was a blast.
For me it makes a game feel like a second job. I'm not wealthy so I'm trying to save and make something for myself but playing these games just feels like experience the same dread and fear i have in reality.
1) "Whales" keep nearly all of these games going. "Vote with your wallet" is a misnomer because in typical democratic systems a vote is a vote; but capitalism isn't a democracy and a very small portion of the playerbase will actually sustain the game near-singlehandedly. Its not a situation where enough people don't buy it and the game company changes; its a situation where enough people don't buy it, and are missing out on a piece of the game due to not buying it, while the elite 0.1% buy everything.
2) "They don't alter gameplay". That's an interesting argument. Take a game like Animal Crossing; would being able to buy a sweet ass new table for your house "alter gameplay"? Isn't aesthetic the gameplay? I truly and deeply believe that its difficult to draw this line in any game; where the "gameplay" stops and suddenly the "stuff that doesn't matter so sell it" starts; if the product has value, such that people buy it, then it must be an important part of the game. It may not affect the competitive balance, but that isn't the entire game; the developers put time into the visual aesthetic of the game, and to assert that the items are ok to sell simply because they don't affect the gameplay trivializes the items' importance.
Moreover, in a much smaller way; in every game I've played, these items do affect competitive balance. Often in subtle ways. In Valorant, having a cool gun skin can often mean eight year olds on your team asking for you to buy the gun for them, so they can use it (sometimes, promising a re-buy in return, then not doing it lol). In Apex Legends, some hero outfits legitimately camouflage you with the environment than others. In Dead By Daylight, the Feng Ming wearing the bright pink jacket will be tunneled by the killer more than everyone else wearing drab browns and torn jeans. To assert "the way you look doesn't impact the gameplay" is trivially and wholly, if not sometimes subtly, incorrect; games are visual, looking good asserts a socioeconomic power structure which can impact team cooperation, all of this does matter.
But, to clarify; gaming companies need to make money. For online service games, its not enough to just sell the game for $70 and call it good for life; even doing so can be a death sentence for the game, as the barrier to entry is so high no one joins in to even play. Loot boxes are extremely bad, and games which sell them should be held to the same legal standards as gambling (Overwatch, Apex Legends, Rocket League, DOTA2, CS:GO, etc). A cash-for-item storefront is better (Fortnite, Valorant, Warzone, Dead by Daylight, Sea of Thieves, Halo Infinite, etc). Battle Passes are probably one of the best solutions I've seen yet; they're effectively an optional subscription service to the game, with resetting progression (players love progression). Pure subscription services are rare, but also a great solution; CS:GO has one, but WoW was the better example; there was a time when you simply paid to play, and everything cool you could get was bundled into that subscription. Today, things have changed, and they're double-dipping revenue models, like most of the games listed above.
I honestly think we've become too entitled.
The vast majority of "free to play" games would not be able to make a profit of they didn't find a few players willing to spend huge amounts of money on them. Thousands of dollars, from people who often can't afford to spend thousands of dollars on a hobby.
And not only are these games sustained by such people, they actively seek to find and exploit them, with game mechanics and presentation designed to hook a certain kind of psyche - people with gambling or other mental issues, and children.
Video games are what they are for the same reason Marvel Character CGI-fest Sequel/Spinoff X blows away the box office every summer.
So it's not exactly true that the public are voting with their wallets here. It's a profitable business model, but the majority of people do not engage with it, and consumers as a whole would be better-off if it died out.
Seems like a good system that everyone happy with. If they weren't happy they would go play other games that aren't free.
Frankly I'm torn: people can buy digital stickerbomb skins if they want, but it's obviously a bit of a "cheat code" to a profitable game and probably takes a lot of developers/money away from more interesting parts of the industry.
It'd also be more forgivable if it didn't seem popularity creates nearly immortal games that too often become stagnant and overrun with toxic players despite still being profitable enough to "keep alive", i.e. payday 2, planetside 2
And yet they put me off because you're constantly confronted with mechanisms designed to make you pay. I don't mind paying for a game, but once I'm playing, I want to focus on the game, not the payment.
It’s not a healthy business model for consumers, but ever since I saw the start of this industry trend I’ve come to view consumers of it (in aggregate) as being of poor judgement if not outright stupid. So they kind of reap what they sew, and the rest of us must work harder to find quality. Just like in everything else really.
Addictiveness and addiction are issues with and around gaming, for sure. But the reliance of f2p games on entranced, pixel-charmed addicts is also overstated. A good number of free to play games have lifespans measured in decades, they can function like a highly social, off-and-on hobby. People are willing to spend $20 to go to the movies a few times per year. How’s it different to spend that on a game you get hundreds of hours of entertainment from?
The gambling-games are only the most obvious whale-traps, and they usually not even aim for the filthy rich, but the middle class rich. The rich rich-games are less obvious, because the casuals are not rich enough to even get high enough in that game to gain access to the juicy parts.
Possibly, but not in the mainstream market. I'm not concerned with some weird niche luxury thing that 8 rich guys are doing. And as far as the mainstream market goes, the "rich guy to whom money means nothing" is not the average whale. Most whales (as I recall) are of fairly average means.
I hate this argument because it implies you have any power in this situation. They don't do this because the majority likes it, they do it because there's a select group of whales that are willing to spend ungodly amounts of money on this crap. They're the ones who dictate how these games operate and no amount of "vote with your wallet" would change it.
Reality is, the market meets a demand where there is a demand. The developers are not the sole responsible people for choosing to put in gambling gimmicks, incomplete games for 25-60 bucks, DLC which should've been base, P2W, etc. There is just as much of a responsibility on customers to vote with their money, or vote for laws to ban this shit if it becomes evident people can't control themselves as a whole. We haven't reached the critical mass where you don't have other options yet, and it looks like we won't for quite some time.
Meanwhile almost every indie trying to fit in the market and come with their passionate solution is met with a dire reality that selling games takes a tremendous amount of effort for anyone who doesn't have a giant brand behind them.
Yes you do. While there is little we actually control in our complex world, we are at least in control of our discretionary purchasing decisions. Sure, you as an individual might not make a dent in the company's profits but thats not the point. You are making a decision on principle, thats all that matters.
If we cant get this part right, what hope do we have for more important stuff like voting in actual elections?
The amount of games available on Steam is such that you can play indie games, old classics and anything to your liking for decades, while completely avoiding the types of game the author laments about.
There were plenty of just horrible, bad games back in the day too. Games that would crash all the time, had terrible gameplay, graphics, story, you name it. You just avoided the bad ones.
2. There are many games that aren’t loot box-esque. To say “video games have become this” is very unfair.
I bought a skin to support the devs, just like I did on Among Us.
As a generally “always by the cart” type of person, I think I'm starting to come around to the “pay what you want” model.
1. Should not be able to purchase a competitive advantage
2. Should be able to purchase the item you want.
Re the second point, if you want the rare items and that involves gambling random item opaque loot boxes, that's an abusive relationship. If it involves purchasing the item directly, or buying a box where you can see all the items inside of it, that's a respectful relationship. Purchasing the item directly is the most preferred.
Games that do this entire model badly involve Hearthstone and any number of mobile games made by Supercell.
Some people might balk at the idea of purchasing any further items, but personally, I don't see anything particularly wrong with allowing cosmetics to be purchased and applied as a model that enables people to have a great free experience.
For a more detailed exploration of the dark side of Fortnite's monetization model, check out "Manufactured Discontent and Fortnite" [2].
[1]: https://www.polygon.com/2019/5/7/18534431/fortnite-rare-defa... [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPHPNgIihR0
If not that, they'd bully each other about something else. When I was growing up, us kids who played Battletech and had a Nintendo were cool, and the Robotech kids with their Segas were the jerks (of course they'd say the opposite). Kids who weren't into games would pick on each other over other stuff, like having a generic notebook instead of a Trapper Keeper with a cool design.
The idea that Fortnite is pressuring kids to be mean to each other is just as overblown as all the other "think of the children!" claims. From "Rock n Roll is the devil's music!" to the Satanic Panic over Dungeons and Dragons and beyond. People will always claim that something is making the kids bad, but no, that's just how kids are. Old people have just forgotten what kids are like.
You can also find plenty of anecdotes of kids helping each other out in team mode, or building creative mode areas in games where they can cooperate and have fun, giving an escape and some camaraderie to other kids who don't normally have that in their lives.
Also, "children will bully each other no matter what" is not a rational response to something which exacerbates bullying. That's like saying "accidents happen no matter what, this is no worse than normal" with respect to a defective car with broken airbags.
I think a lot of us have a vision of a childlike, halcyon "purity" of experience, in the joy of gameplay itself, that we would seek and enjoy with or without other people's presence, with or without money. We want to experience that, we also as programmers (who may have learned to code because we like games) often have a deep desire to create that, to give it to others. It's like the "Beatific Vision" in the life of one who likes games.
We all know there always was a need for money, and passionate creativity exists in its margin. I think the complaint here really is that this margin seems to have less room in the eyes of the complainers, because the pull for money is present in virtually every game loop now, as opposed to being outside of the box...
A question I want to ask is, for newest generation of whales, is there a memory of some great, memorable exploratory rush in the big spend for them, part of a broader set of social interactions that gave them great joy and built them up in their community? Would their experience with the game due to this purchased power inspire them in any way, maybe to make some potentially positive, impactful life decisions? Or is it literally just a borderline scam at every single possible level?
I dislike microtransactions of any kind strongly, but I am at least trying here to be open to the possibility that someone who did them was able to feel something similar in relationship to them somehow.
We ended up with about 25 people sticking around, people idolized me and it was fun for awhile. Eventually (after a few months) I got bored and gave the reins over to a much less “fearless leader founder” person and much more “I am an accountant irl and Eve sounds neat” type person, which worked out pretty well, and the corporation thrived. I think back fondly to that and felt like it was worth it.
Alternatively, maybe ten years ago I spent a similar amount of money on this mobile game that was like sim city and Pokémon and time lapse command and conquer all rolled into one. I hate that I played that and hate how they managed to get my addiction loop just right and I was spending most of my paycheck on this stupid game. I had a guild and “friends” there too but it just felt like we were a bunch of addicts justifying each other’s spending habits. We knew what the in app purchase limits were for apple and how to get around them and stuff that just seems insane to me now.
I wrote my own free open source browser game. https://landgreen.github.io/sidescroller/
"N-gon is a physics-based single player 2-d platformer shooter with hundreds of different power ups. You move with the keyboard and aim with the mouse. The core game is done, but I'm still adding new content.
You can play here for free. It's open source, no ads, no tracking, no data harvesting, no crypto-mining, no DLCs, no freemium, no microtransactions, no gacha."
> "Like you are watching Avengers End game in Netflix and they ask you if you wanna pay 5 dollars more to watch Captain America use his well known outfit instead of regular clothes?"
While that example is unlikely, we may in the future see paid narrative arcs. The base movie might be free, taking you to a certain point in story where you're presented a fork in road. One path is free with low budget action, the other paid and contains more action, more sex and big budget scenes!
Looking at my Steam library, I only regret the $60 AAA titles I've bought and never found interesting enough to play beyond a few hours. $60 for 15 hours of gameplay, or an optional $100 after 150 (or 1500) hours? I know which I prefer.
I vastly prefer the freemium model because of this. It's great compared to before when we had sequels, expansion packs or even map packs that was the only way to get new content. But that new content wasn't available to people who didn't buy it, so now the playerbase will be split each time new content is released.
I will say it sucks when the cosmetic item you want is only available via lootbox, but at least for Counter-Strike Global Offensive (another Valve title) you can buy either boxes or the exact item you want. I think Valve is pretty far from the worst offender here.
If you pay, you're a member of the community, if not, you're not
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPHPNgIihR0
It’s like, $1 for an arbitrary skin, no?
I haven't played Call of Duty in a long time, but when I heard that Modern Warfare Remastered would have some maps locked behind a DLC[0] (along with the rest of the shitshow surrounding its release), I knew that I'd probably never buy another one of those titles again. I think the last I bought was MW2 or BO2.
On PC, in Modern Warfare 1, the maps were made available for free, while they cost extra for consoles. Modern Warfare Remastered 'conveniently' left them out of the base game, but charged a higher-than-original price for the pack, for all platforms. Consider that a remaster is generally supposed to contain all content (i.e. game + DLC), and this was a slap in the face to my younger self.
[0]https://callofduty.fandom.com/wiki/Variety_Map_Pack